Development: For Whom?

I heard the whisperings last year: A new mine. For metal, nickel? The Chinese. The Chinese.

I returned to a torrent of words—in the papers and in the village. On the Madang coast, the Chinese company Ramu NiCo was building a new nickel mine, Kurumbukari, a business deal brokered by and profiting Port Moresby. Compensation to the native landowners? 10 or 15% and limited opportunity for employment say my village sources. One headmaster estimated that 1 in 10 of the employees were Papua New Guinean (though the company’s promotion materials promised employment to 2,000 during this construction phase); the rest were non-English, non-Pidgin-speaking Chinese. And this, the headmaster said, was a problem. Local employees, unable to communicate with their Chinese superiors, had voiced unanswered concerns about land rights and compensation. One day last August, members of a local tribe showed up and literally beat Chinese workers over a dispute about working conditions, Reuters reported. This May, the dispute was touched off by an accident injuring a PNG worker.

The rash of violence was echoed in Moresby and moved swiftly across the country. Local groups reportedly looted Chinese stores and attacked their owners, protesting Chinese products. The long-time Chinese owner of our local station store left for good after the police stood by while his store was ransacked, our local host here reported.

In my conversation with Mater Primary’s Head Master, I questioned why it was the Chinese that where receiving the anger of the PNG community when the Aussies, Kiwis and Americans have been exploiting PNG resources for years. Even in Madang, another American outfit operates with relatively little confrontation from the local community. His answer: In a country where language means everything, absent lines of communication quickly leads to distrust and anger. It didn’t help that the Chinese initially refused to have a feasibility study done on the site to determine how the project would effect the environment and how the company would manage runoff.

The National newspaper reported that when fully operationally, the mine would treat 3.2 million tons of ore each year to produce 31,000 tons of nickel and 3,200 tons of cobalt, leaving the leftover sludge to drain through a 135 km pipeline that is reported to run along the highway and waterway, cut through villages, and stand on unsound foundations.

Donald, our host and assistant to Sumkar Minister of Parliament Ken Fairweather, regaled us with the story of the mine’s Chinese boss meri Madam Luo Shu meeting the MP and Donald after dinner at the swanky Madang Resort checkbook in hand, offering to write a blank note in return for the MP’s silence regarding a feasibility study. Apparently, he adamantly refused and eventually his campaign for the study helped to make it happen.

So, I asked, if a PNG mining company—should one exist—open a new mine, would the owners face the same difficulty? Was the problem exploitation, xenophobia, or the actual destruction of valuable land and resources? The Headmaster assured me that no such PNG company existed, but if it did, opening operations would be all right, they after all would have to be accountable to locals through other systems beside payment (notably, traditional wontok culture). They would also presumably know the right ways to protect and honor the land. (This year on Karkar, just up the hill from Taleng, the Irish company Digicel built a new cell tower at the sacred site of the mana piti (the “stone pig”) and locals claim our coverage is schizophrenic because the building wasn’t properly blessed with a singsing and kaikai.) I’m not sure how or when large scale business ownership by Papau New Guinean’s will happen, but I am hopeful the current expats will only be a passing model—and not the long-term mainstay—of this country’s economy.

Ask a Papua New Guinean if they seek development for their country and they will almost certainly answer yes. That is, “Yes, we want to improve the standard of living.” But development is so much more—and the forces that implement it accompany it are not fully understood by most.

The promise of business brings many to city centers then leaves them jobless. Their children miss the education of traditional life and find there are not equipped to make their living in town or out. (Though the new curriculum reform aims to educate children in traditional ways, including the equivalent of home economics and shop for the bush.) Those who do welcome the “developers” to their land and get employment in the mines or other businesses find their resources spoiled and themselves powerless in a foreign-run bureaucracy.

I’d like to think education is the answer. And yet, the very small number of business majors that do graduate from the country’s few universities cannot always find employment. My friend Christine, a recent graduate of the business studies program at UPNG, is now back at home still looking for a job. She estimates that only about 60% of her classmates—graduates of the top university in the country—find employment. Education is a much-needed foundation, but it will take capital and investment in PNG’s own populace if the country hopes to be more than a satellite state to China and other interests in the Pacific.