Stopping the rot

From Tony Flynn

 

You may wish to look back through at viable nation states of the various sizes throughout history.

They all had some form of farm tenure that allowed the farmers to support the entire society, and the leaders recognised this in the way they ran the state.

The farmers may have been treated badly but they were the underpinning of the state.

 Papua New Guinea is built from the top as an artificial democracy; the farm system is still the result of thousands of years of isolation.

 Sustainable farming is built on a permanent and stable farming system.

From this base we may develop a stable government.

 In PNG most of our politicians are joined at the hip in their greed for aid money and the money from external exploiters of PNG resources.

 My point is that, until there is a big change in the farming system away from shifting agriculture, the whole country is based upon exploitation.

Developers exploit the minerals, fisheries and forests.

The PNG farmers exploit the soil; they exhaust the soil and move on to a fresh area.

This is the situation that has to change before our society changes.