Thoughts on Papua New Guinea's new balus

By RONALD BULUM

 

WHEN Talasea forestry resources owners were chartering an aircraft just so they could go to Hoskins to get kettles for their wives, and when Hami Yawari was splurging kina like confetti, no traditional, uneducated Papua New Guinean complained.

The illiterate had no reason to begrudge Yawari or the Talasea because he came from a society where the measure of a man's wealth was shown by the display of his possessions or as ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski noted in the Trobriand Islands between 1915 and 1918, his ability to give.

The tradition of giving to show wealth - from those pleasurable exotic isles to the cold and rugged Torricelli mountains - is suffice to say, widespread.

Little wonder then that the West New British and the Southern Highlanders gave no thought to keeping money in a safe or bank.

Their, or our habits, have given The Nationwide Micro Bank impetus to go to as young as possible an age group in Finschhafen primary schools to instill a sense of "savings culture".

It is going to be a stiff challenge.

Our habits have given economists who were molded in the intellectual teachings of philosopher Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations, a sudden turn.

Instead of using the Gross Domestic Product as the yard stick to measuring a nation's standing, in which the ability to earn and save in the bank and increase liquidity and hold the balance of payments higher is an influential factor; other economists think otherwise.

They pursue the notion that a country's wealth should be measured by the amount of income per capita that is spent.

By that paradigm, Time Magazine in about late 1992 showed that Papua New Guinea, Mexico and China could not be classified as Third World Nations or under developed, or (the more politically correct term) Developing Nation.

Papua New Guinea was listed as one of the top 25 nations.

Papua New Guineans are big spenders - compulsive buyers.

And the square root is that they come from a rich society, naturally.

In traditional Papua New Guinea, there was no such thing as poverty.

Efforts by economic researchers to delve into the proportions of urban and rural population that are living in poverty and of the extent of their poverty, have shown that by their measure, all rural Papua New Guineans were in poverty because they were living on less than K1 a day (K362 a year) - less than enough to feed a fat baby a day in New York.

Yet no one died of starvation in starch-starved Mortlock or protein-deficient Mt Wilhelm.

Even city outcasts at Sabama, Newtown, Kaugere, and Hunter, Bumayong and 4 Mile didn't need to drink unboiled drain water.

Poverty is clearly defined when someone can't feed himself (and that he has no choice). 

The Port Moresby and Lae squatters may be hungry. But they choose to be hungry. They have a choice to go back to their villages and till their land and fish the rivers and hunt their bushes.

With that in mind, consider Cambridge fellow and Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, 1958: Penguin Books Ltd, Hammondsworth, UK.

"Nearly all throughout history have been very poor.

"The exception, almost insignificant in the whole span of human existence, has been the last few generations, in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans.

"Here, and especially in the United States, there has been great and quite, unprecedented affluence.

"The ideas by which the people of this favoured part of the world interpret their existence, and in measure guide their behaviour, were not forged in a world of wealth.

"These ideas were the product of a world in which poverty had always been man's normal lot, and any other state was in degree unimaginable.

"This poverty was not the elegant torture of the spirit which comes from contemplating another man's more spacious possessions.

"It was the unedifying mortification of the flesh - from hunger, sickness, and cold. Those who might be freed temporarily from such burden could not know when it will strike again, for at best hunger yielded only perilously to privation.

"It is improbable that poverty of the masses of the people was made greatly more bearable by the fact that a very few - those upon whose movements nearly all recorded history centres - were very rich.

"No one would wish to argue that the ideas which interpreted this world of grim scarcity would serve people equally well for the contemporary United States.

"Poverty was the all-pervasive fact of that world."

The thought of Dr Galbraith; someone who headed the American Office of Price Administration during the very trying time of stretching of resources in WWII, and studied the nadir of free market economics in his The Great Crash 1929, is that classical economics was born in a harsh world of mass poverty.

It has left us with a set of preconceptions hard to adapt to the realities of our own richer age.

In that vein, the Papua New Guineans schooled in western economic thought are finding it hard to cope with Sir Michael's (Air Niugini's) buy.

But the villager will say, "Go for it, Somare".