W hen the Akmana Gold Prospecting Company first penetrated the highlands and rainforests of Papua New Guinea in 1929, the many tribes they found were using seashells as the main form of currency. The last known tribe using stone-age technology was discovered in the Papuan jungle in 1980. Suddenly exposed to a modern, globalised society, the Papuan people have skipped thousands of years of developmental stages and gone from hunting and gathering to a modern state economy within a few decades.
Approximately 500 miles from Cairns in Australia sits Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. It’s a noisy, unsettled place of 400,000 that lends itself to the tentacles of economic progress.
An indigenous culture has clashed with the weight of the modern age. Papuan cultural identity in a globalised world has had to adopt and adapt. This shock has meant many rural people have abandoned traditional subsistence lives in favour of life in cities like Port Moresby. Poverty has spread in these urban centres where people outnumber jobs.
New urbanites, fresh from the forest, are more accustomed to spreading seeds than spreadsheets. Crime in poor areas is a daily feature of life as desperation rises with unemployment. Domestic violence, an accepted part of family life, seems more brutal once in close urban confinement.
Around £600m worth of British trade lies in Papua. Rich in natural resources, it’s a dual economy trading in mining (gold, silver, copper and nickel) and oil, as well as more traditional means like fishing, forestry, coffee, palm oil, copra, cocoa and vanilla.
Exploitation has been hampered by a naturally rugged terrain and the high cost of developing infrastructure.
Agriculture still provides 75 percent of Papuans with a subsistence livelihood, yet two-thirds of the country’s export relies on mineral deposits. The demand for what lies beneath its soil is what’s kept it largely immune from the effects of the global financial crisis.
By the end of 2010 an estimated 227bn cubic metres of natural gas reserves will be tapped into, following the installation of a liquefied natural gas production facility. When Papua begins to export the results three or four years later, the current GDP of nearly £10bn could double and its export revenue triple.
Grave digging
A spine of mountains and rainforests runs through the country. This provides the raw material for a logging industry dominated by Malaysian-owned companies. Environmental groups highlight that Papua New Guinea’s forests, like the Amazon rainforest, serve as indispensable filters for the planet’s carbon dioxide. Local activism can work to change some logging practices: a local movement led by policeman-turned-environmentalist Galeva Sep chased out an exploitative Malaysian logging firm, replacing it with locally run eco-logging operations. But those victories are few and far between.
However, grass roots activism is growing almost in direct proportion to foreign speculation on Papuan land. As companies move in, people rise up.
Mining on the Papua New Guinea/West Papuan border has destroyed land by flooding iron phosphate sediments at Kiunga’s Ok Tedi mine into the river system. The sediment is the result of gold and copper mining and contains poisonous iron pyrites. Environmentalists predict that over 300,000 hectares of land will be poisoned by these sediments at the next major flood, directly affecting hundreds of thousands living on the Ok Tedi and Fly River basin who rely on a delicate environmental balance for their livelihoods. People hunt, fish, bathe and cultivate land on the banks of these sediment-shrunken rivers.
It is clear where Papua New Guinea’s government stands in the tussle between the planet and prosperity. They have upset conservationists, landowners and parliamentarians after recently changing environmental laws that will make it harder to prosecute mining projects like the environmentally damaging Chinese-run Ramu nickel mine. The law now prevents local landowners from suing companies for negligence.
The mine’s owners, Chinese Metallurgical, lobbied hard to amend the law, which can also be applied to any other resource project in the country. Rugged terrain, lack of infrastructure, corruption and disputes with landowners have previously hampered foreign companies from investing heavily in Papua New Guinea. But because it is one of the few places in the world as yet untouched by widespread resource development, it is ripe for exploitation.
Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare’s government has spent most of its energy remaining in power. He was the first Prime Minister to complete a five-year term and has been a prominent feature in the country’s progress since independence in 1975. Through expenditure control and controversial legislation, his government has brought stability to the national budget. But they face the challenges of gaining investor confidence, restoring integrity and trust to state institutions, and balancing relations with Australia – its strongest trading partner and the Western country with the most sway in Papua New Guinea’s fate.
Land privatisation is a major source of wealth, but also what’s been blamed for the civil war on Bougainville Island.
Papuan land is, by tradition, communally owned by the tribe or an alliance of tribes. Private investment and purchase of land and resource, usually by a foreign multinational, upsets this historical balance. Instead of fighting off conquistadors and colonials, Papuans fought among themselves and flew progress as a standard.
Spirited away
Papuans are an incredibly diverse social bunch. Over a thousand different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea and nearly a third of the world’s dialects and languages can be found there. Although declared a Christian country, its tribal and animist roots come through in its art, dance, weaponry, costume, music and architecture. Ancestor spirits are represented in wood-carvings in the form of plants and animals along the Sepik River.
Papuans have a clan system called “wantok” – a Pidgin English corruption of “one talk” – by which members of the same tribe look out for, feed and help each other. It is not unknown for Papuan tribes to have their own language. This extended tribal family underpins all of Papuan society – including that of government.
Highland peoples take part in colourful rituals called “sing-sings”. They paint themselves and dress up in feathers, pearls, shells and animal skins to represent birds, trees and mountain spirits. They then re-enact important legends, battles and events in dance and song.
Religious change has also thrust its way across the country, which is now 96 percent Christian. Papuan law upholds the constitutional right to freedom of speech, thought and belief, and old animist spirit houses are now churches for Catholics, Lutherans and other denominations. Images of Christ hang next to those of Spirit Men and the skulls of ancestors. Christianity is seen as a positive in Papua New Guinea; people talk of how it’s brought education, medicine and some degree of inter-tribal unity.
As one of the most heterogeneous countries in the world, Papua New Guinea is not without its socio-cultural mountains. It has the highest infection rate of HIV/AIDS in all of East Asia and the Pacific; more than 11 percent of the population are thought to be infected, and it is one of the leading causes of death in the country. Urgent steps by non-governmental organisations and the World Health Organisation are being taken to prevent the spread, but the country is likely to become a major HIV/AIDS centre within the next decade.
Concrete jungles
It’s also a notoriously violent place. Crisis-level social violence is commonplace. Normal. A way to deal with the everyday. Medecins Sans Frontiers and other charities have stressed that violence in Papua New Guinea is like poverty in need of long-term systemic change, rather than an emergency response.
Cities like Port Moresby, Lae and Mount Hagen are facing one of the side-effects of rising economic prosperity: gangs. Tribal allegiances and divisions are ingrained even after migration to the cities, and the gangs formed as a result – called Raskals – are arming themselves by trading drugs for guns. The level of violence in these cities is astonishing, particularly for a country that is not at war. While the machete is still the weapon of choice, firearms are becoming more accessible and popular. Police shoot first and ask questions later.
Gender imbalance in Papua New Guinea runs deep. A recent report from Amnesty International declares that two thirds of women experience physical violence at the hands of their husbands – and in one part of the country, it’s close to 100 percent. Sixty percent of men have admitted to being involved in at least one gang rape.
Although the government says it is committed to eradicating all forms of sexual and gender-based violence, it is not legislation that is lacking but the enforcement of it. Due to the lack of white collar education for rural women migrating to urban centres, prostitution is high.
The UK Foreign Office recommends travellers are “vigilant while travelling in all cities, particularly in hours of darkness.” “Armed carjackings, assaults, robbery, shootings and serious sexual offences, including rape, are common,” it says: “the situation is unpredictable.” However, there are currently no travel restrictions for British travellers in place for Papua New Guinea.
Thanks to its mountainous spine, in-country transport is heavily limited. Port Moresby, the nation’s capital, is isolated. It isn’t linked to any other major town and many villages can only be reached on foot, light aircraft or helicopter. To this end, air travel underpins national travel. People and products are transported through the skies. Papua New Guinea has two international airfields and no fewer than 578 airstrips – most of which are unpaved and rather choppy at landing. This bottom-breaking means of moving about is to be redressed as the need for a more unified transport network becomes greater.
There’s an adage about trying to run before learning to walk. In Papua New Guinea’s case, it’s off doing a triathlon as soon as it’s taken its first breaths of life. The pressures of money and power are heavy on a state that suffers the culture shock of a globalised world. With cooperative international help, it can overcome its handicap to become a newly industrialised economy with its people’s interest at its core. But without a careful hand, the country’s rush into modernity could turn it into a place for multinationals to thoughtlessly plunder natural resources. Its people will suffer the indignity of being governed by the greed of cronyism. The traditions of care for the greater good will drown in poisoned floods. And culture will be reduced to headdresses and body paint – a museum piece for tourists.
