7 ideas to improve Papua New Guinea
By JOHN FOWKE
1. Our agriculturalists are cash-poor subsistence farmers, and their land-entitlements are held under customary clan-authorised usufructuary understandings. The daily life of subsistence-dependant families is dictated by needs both physical and in regard to social obligations. A trading, budgeting, calculating sort of life it is not; and since the cessation of the need for constant preparedness for war, mens’ part in it has lacked imperatives and become accepting of a role where a taste for leisure may be indulged. All these facts militate against any inclination for a typical rural clansman to set up a commercial farming enterprise. And yet, although modified in recent times our extension methods tend to focus upon technology and business-mindedness. Instead of creating sad and silly monstrosities like the morbid and bad-debt-ridden 20-hectare coffee scheme and the smallholder cattle schemes of twenty years ago. I believe we should encourage the production of cash crops using a realistic and pragmatic, traditionally-based approach. We should encourage families to set themselves a cash-earning target, budgeted according to family-estimated needs over a five –year period. Then, using what is to hand in terms of centuries-old knowledge, simple hand-tools, family labour and clan-approved land-use entitlements, a farm-plan covering family food needs and the budgeted, traditionally-farmed cash-producing element may be made. Not a difficult exercise, and there is plenty of paid assistance available if growers insist upon being helped in terms of their real requirements instead of receiving what they are told is superior wisdom and technological expertise.
2 I have to say here that in the late ‘eighties I introduced and managed just such a scheme in EHP and WHP, in which small loans made in terms of actual tools and materials rather than cash, were utilised by some 200 coffee-grower families. They paid nothing for the input of the extension officers who visited regularly. We created a cadre of “barefoot didman” being experienced coffee- men, ex-plantation bossboys and the like, who would take a blanket and a few possessions in a bag and head out on a Monday, touring, providing active, hands-on assistance, living with their twenty or so “clients” and returning to report at the end of the fortnight. All loans were paid out by the family borrowers within the allowed two-year or three-year period of loan. The system, the Ag. Banks’ “Agricultural Client Service” was smaller but just as successful and ground-breaking as the better-known Agbank “Stretpasin Stoa” scheme. Like the Stoa scheme, it is not just moribund. It is dead and gone for want of energy and enterprise from the bureaucrats in charge at Waigani. And yet, 200 families demonstrably increased their earnings from coffee and thus their welfare, to their great advantage.
3. The cash-crop concerned might consist of an existing coffee or cocoa or coconut plot, to be rehabilitated by planned infilling of dead trees and unproductive trees using new plants raised from seed from established and recognisably-good trees.. Extension services have not performed well in providing quality planting material, even though they insist that their clones or varieties must be used. And the history of sponsored commercial nurseries in the coffee-industry is one of almost total failure. A small nursery of a few hundred plants is easy to create, using readily-available self-sown, selected plants- but it must be near a water-source so that young plants may be watered in dry weather. It must also be fenced to keep pigs out, and whilst this can involve the use of wire, it is also feasible to fence a nursery using traditional materials and method. Healthy, strong, one- year-old seedlings planted out at the onset of the wet season can be protected from pigs by small, strong individual barriers made of four or five sharpened stakes. None of this work is hard or tedious- ( in fact it can be very satisfying in itself)- and may be carried out within the same regime and rhythm as the establishment and nurturing of a family food-garden and the raising of pigs..
4. The upkeep of such a cash-crop plot, sufficient to support the cash-needs of a typical subsistence-economy-supported family is not onerous and it has many rewards aside from the cash generated. To be avoided, and I emphasise this, are concepts and practices which are expensive and technologically-complex. Those who have completed training at some level in agricultural science and who are employed to help growers by the various PNG commodity boards have a vested interest in pushing the industrial or capital-intensive concepts they have learned, and they do this. They are telling people about a future whilst the peoples’ needs are in the present. They have no Good Book full of understandable parables and meaningful experience. The peoples’ eyes show that they are not listening. The well-dressed technology-evangelists get into the 4WD and head back to town, instead of remaining to talk when everyone comes home in the evening and are ready to listen. That’s how it is today.
5. Unless, and this seems unlikely in PNG, there is a violent overthrow of custom-sanctioned land-tenure practices, similar to the takeover of peasant-worked tributary land-use systems by the class-and-wealth empowered landlords of England and Scotland at the dawn of the Industrial revolution much of what is being taught and imparted by extension officers is irrelevant. This is made obvious by slow take-up. One reads constant references by political brief-case carriers to the laxity of the commodity boards in terms of pushing big new plantings and raising exports to targets like the one for coffee chosen years ago of “2 Million Bags by Year 2000.” In fact, the nation’s coffee-growers have shown that in three decades of rapid population growth they have found it possible only to maintain an average of 1 million bags- and have maintained this average ever since 1987- 25 years ago. This has been a period of increasing age-related yield decline, so some coffee has indeed been planted. But the growers are saying something. Why doesn’t anyone listen? The tree-population in the cocoa and copra industries is also moribund. For coffee, an immediate input of 150 million seedlings is just the start for replacement, let alone augmentation of planted areas
6. What I am saying here about coffee applies equally to copra and cocoa, but these crops, especially copra, are extremely-badly served by the coastal shipping services. Their commodity-boards may want a shake-up, too. The major coffee-growing areas have road and access problems in plenty, but they are not as bereft of services as road-less coastal villages are. This aspect alone has killed the trade in copra in many once-productive coastal and island areas.
7. PNG has made the great jump from stone-age to Toyota-age in 100 years- a feat worthy of great praise and due recognition. But rural people and their families and livelihoods and customs can only be pushed faster than this by violent, authoritarian means, by dispossession as was done in England and Scotland 250 years ago. Its not going to happen that way in PNG. Traditional land-ownership custom and practice will be modified only very slowly as long as the rule of law prevails, so lets just do cash-crop development our way, the traditional PNG way. Its not simply cash income as such that we are talking about here. Its the building of an active, healthy, progressive rural lifestyle to encompass modern aspirations and views. Frustration and idleness is a prison without bars. Satisfaction of aspirations and ambition in rural areas is an important element in building a positive, modern PNG.
1. Our agriculturalists are cash-poor subsistence farmers, and their land-entitlements are held under customary clan-authorised usufructuary understandings. The daily life of subsistence-dependant families is dictated by needs both physical and in regard to social obligations. A trading, budgeting, calculating sort of life it is not; and since the cessation of the need for constant preparedness for war, mens’ part in it has lacked imperatives and become accepting of a role where a taste for leisure may be indulged. All these facts militate against any inclination for a typical rural clansman to set up a commercial farming enterprise. And yet, although modified in recent times our extension methods tend to focus upon technology and business-mindedness. Instead of creating sad and silly monstrosities like the morbid and bad-debt-ridden 20-hectare coffee scheme and the smallholder cattle schemes of twenty years ago. I believe we should encourage the production of cash crops using a realistic and pragmatic, traditionally-based approach. We should encourage families to set themselves a cash-earning target, budgeted according to family-estimated needs over a five –year period. Then, using what is to hand in terms of centuries-old knowledge, simple hand-tools, family labour and clan-approved land-use entitlements, a farm-plan covering family food needs and the budgeted, traditionally-farmed cash-producing element may be made. Not a difficult exercise, and there is plenty of paid assistance available if growers insist upon being helped in terms of their real requirements instead of receiving what they are told is superior wisdom and technological expertise.
2 I have to say here that in the late ‘eighties I introduced and managed just such a scheme in EHP and WHP, in which small loans made in terms of actual tools and materials rather than cash, were utilised by some 200 coffee-grower families. They paid nothing for the input of the extension officers who visited regularly. We created a cadre of “barefoot didman” being experienced coffee- men, ex-plantation bossboys and the like, who would take a blanket and a few possessions in a bag and head out on a Monday, touring, providing active, hands-on assistance, living with their twenty or so “clients” and returning to report at the end of the fortnight. All loans were paid out by the family borrowers within the allowed two-year or three-year period of loan. The system, the Ag. Banks’ “Agricultural Client Service” was smaller but just as successful and ground-breaking as the better-known Agbank “Stretpasin Stoa” scheme. Like the Stoa scheme, it is not just moribund. It is dead and gone for want of energy and enterprise from the bureaucrats in charge at Waigani. And yet, 200 families demonstrably increased their earnings from coffee and thus their welfare, to their great advantage.
3. The cash-crop concerned might consist of an existing coffee or cocoa or coconut plot, to be rehabilitated by planned infilling of dead trees and unproductive trees using new plants raised from seed from established and recognisably-good trees.. Extension services have not performed well in providing quality planting material, even though they insist that their clones or varieties must be used. And the history of sponsored commercial nurseries in the coffee-industry is one of almost total failure. A small nursery of a few hundred plants is easy to create, using readily-available self-sown, selected plants- but it must be near a water-source so that young plants may be watered in dry weather. It must also be fenced to keep pigs out, and whilst this can involve the use of wire, it is also feasible to fence a nursery using traditional materials and method. Healthy, strong, one- year-old seedlings planted out at the onset of the wet season can be protected from pigs by small, strong individual barriers made of four or five sharpened stakes. None of this work is hard or tedious- ( in fact it can be very satisfying in itself)- and may be carried out within the same regime and rhythm as the establishment and nurturing of a family food-garden and the raising of pigs..
4. The upkeep of such a cash-crop plot, sufficient to support the cash-needs of a typical subsistence-economy-supported family is not onerous and it has many rewards aside from the cash generated. To be avoided, and I emphasise this, are concepts and practices which are expensive and technologically-complex. Those who have completed training at some level in agricultural science and who are employed to help growers by the various PNG commodity boards have a vested interest in pushing the industrial or capital-intensive concepts they have learned, and they do this. They are telling people about a future whilst the peoples’ needs are in the present. They have no Good Book full of understandable parables and meaningful experience. The peoples’ eyes show that they are not listening. The well-dressed technology-evangelists get into the 4WD and head back to town, instead of remaining to talk when everyone comes home in the evening and are ready to listen. That’s how it is today.
5. Unless, and this seems unlikely in PNG, there is a violent overthrow of custom-sanctioned land-tenure practices, similar to the takeover of peasant-worked tributary land-use systems by the class-and-wealth empowered landlords of England and Scotland at the dawn of the Industrial revolution much of what is being taught and imparted by extension officers is irrelevant. This is made obvious by slow take-up. One reads constant references by political brief-case carriers to the laxity of the commodity boards in terms of pushing big new plantings and raising exports to targets like the one for coffee chosen years ago of “2 Million Bags by Year 2000.” In fact, the nation’s coffee-growers have shown that in three decades of rapid population growth they have found it possible only to maintain an average of 1 million bags- and have maintained this average ever since 1987- 25 years ago. This has been a period of increasing age-related yield decline, so some coffee has indeed been planted. But the growers are saying something. Why doesn’t anyone listen? The tree-population in the cocoa and copra industries is also moribund. For coffee, an immediate input of 150 million seedlings is just the start for replacement, let alone augmentation of planted areas
6. What I am saying here about coffee applies equally to copra and cocoa, but these crops, especially copra, are extremely-badly served by the coastal shipping services. Their commodity-boards may want a shake-up, too. The major coffee-growing areas have road and access problems in plenty, but they are not as bereft of services as road-less coastal villages are. This aspect alone has killed the trade in copra in many once-productive coastal and island areas.
7. PNG has made the great jump from stone-age to Toyota-age in 100 years- a feat worthy of great praise and due recognition. But rural people and their families and livelihoods and customs can only be pushed faster than this by violent, authoritarian means, by dispossession as was done in England and Scotland 250 years ago. Its not going to happen that way in PNG. Traditional land-ownership custom and practice will be modified only very slowly as long as the rule of law prevails, so lets just do cash-crop development our way, the traditional PNG way. Its not simply cash income as such that we are talking about here. Its the building of an active, healthy, progressive rural lifestyle to encompass modern aspirations and views. Frustration and idleness is a prison without bars. Satisfaction of aspirations and ambition in rural areas is an important element in building a positive, modern PNG.
