Back to the future

From TONY FLYNN in Wau, Morobe province

 

 I made the point that Papua New Guinea had a clean environment when I was trying to promote produce and wild mushroom drying during my election campaign.

I took dried mushroom, bananas and tomatoes as samples to the villages, very acceptable.

Had I won, I would have promoted charcoal production as a precourser of various activities such as produce drying, metal forging and melting local manufacture of

crowbars from car axles, various tools, etc.

 We have here, growing without the benefit of acid rain and windblown pollution, populations of wild mushrooms such as Shiitake, Maitake, Cep or Porchini (fresh on the Kainantu roadside at K4.00 /kilo) and various others.

The mushrooms are in quantity and are freely available to the villagers.

What is not available is the technology to dry them; the marketing can be done through the various exporters.

A million village households with most of them having access to wild mushrooms.

 The world export market is in the billions.

This brings me to the point of this email.

 PNG is training all the experts in mining, intensive (plantation) agriculture, IT, the various professions, these have parallels in developed countries, geologists and

others find employment in developed economies.

There are a lot of proven technologies fit for rural people that, if promoted, would improve life at the village level.

These technologies in the developed countries past were discarded due in part to the wage increases driving improved technology.

Wages in PNG are low leading me to believe that we should go back to find our future.

There is a place for these technologies to be promoted as a part of large organisations' social networking.

Sustainable farming should have a place for local skill development that will enable the communities to be as selfsufficient as possible and obtain only such supplies as are unavailable in the local environment.

·        Charcoal production;

·        Convenient cooking;

·        Forging and repairing simple tools;

·        Drying produce for storage and export to other centres. I previously sold dried rainforest mushrooms to hotels in Lae and Moresby;

·        Building;

·        Lime burning and limestone crushing for building and agriculture respectively;

·        Brick and roof tile making. Brick laying using lime mortar as the Romans did before cement and preferable to cement for this purpose. I have bricks to burn. At present, there are burnt brick building in Goroka that are abour 50 years old. The villagers would have no need to import cement and corrugated iron, especially to remote areas. This could also be a large business close to towns and cities using the deposits of clay present.