Miss South Pacific pageant launched

Reigning Miss South Pacific Queen 2009 Merewalesi Nailatikau (right) with Miss PNG 2010 Rachel James Saperi at the launching of the Miss South Pacific Pageant 2010 in Port Moresby last night. – Nationalpic by AURI EVA

By ANGELINE KARIUS

 REIGNING Miss South Pacific Queen 2009 Merewalesi Nailatikau, 25, officially launched the Miss South Pacific Pageant 2010 last night at the Lamana Hotel, The National reports.

This year’s pageant will be hosted by PNG with NCD Governor Powes Parkop as patron of the pageant.

Other South Pacific Island countries taking part included Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands as well as the US state of Hawaii.

Accompanied by her chaperon mother Latu, PNG-raised Fijian Nailatikau said: “I am happy to revisit Papua New Guinea and willing to learn new things too.”

She said it was important that young women be given the attention at such events to have a voice and speak their minds to address various issues including HIV/AIDS. 

She said as a BSP Go Green ambassador in Fiji, she was adamant about raising awareness on the environment and its importance to humans.

Nailatikau added that last year’s theme on “climate change campaigner” reflected that importance during the event.  

Nailatikau lived with her parents at the Sopas medical college in Wabag, Enga, from six months old to five years before her parents, who were medical missionaries, returned to Fiji.

Law student axed to death

Brutal killing payback by rival clan, say police

 

By JUNIOR UKAHA and THOMAS HUKAHU

 

A FIRST-year law student at the University of Papua New Guinea has been hacked to pieces by rival Enga clansmen in an apparent payback killing in the Port Moresby suburb of Morata, The National reports.

Bystanders watched in horror as a group of men dragged Christopher George Kalupai, from Wapele village, Laiagam, out of a PMV bus near Tokam police barracks at about 3pm on Monday as he was returning home to Morata 3.

Police criminal investigation division detectives confirmed the killing, adding that no arrests had been made.

Last night, metropolitan commander Supt Fred Yakasa appealed to the suspects of the killing to surrender to police today.

The victim’s aunt, Vicky Kalupai, said frightened mothers in the bus had begged the captors to release her nephew but were warned not to talk or their throats would be slit.

He was put into a waiting vehicle and driven away.

Searching relatives found the chopped-up body about four hours later, near the Pawa station settlement, also at Morata 2.

Relatives believed Kalupai’s killing stemmed from last month’s bashing death of a man from Ambum at a Morota 2 bus stop which was blamed on the Kalupai family.

Yakasa condemned the killing, saying it was a payback killing by another Engan tribe.

“While the authorities in the city are trying to make Port Moresby a model city, some people are taking the law into their own hands and killing others,” he said.

“This must stop. We will not take this incident lightly. We will come down real hard on the suspects.”

 He called on the two groups not to take the law into their own hands.

“This is not the highlands; this is not your village.

“This is the capital of PNG; we are living in a civil society and there is a rule of law and we must all respect that,” Yakasa said.

 

 

Mystery body rotting in cave

By PEARSON KOLO

 

THE body of an adult male is decomposing inside a cave in the bushes of Hal River in the mountains of Nondogul, Western Highlands, The National reports.

Western Highlands provincial police commander Kaiplo Ambane confirmed the rotting body of an adult male, adding it was difficult to remove the body from the bottom of the cave.

He said locals from Nondogul and North Waghi, who frequented the cave to identify the body, claimed it was of an Asian man or a foreigner.

“The locals are saying this because the body has turned whitish after being in the water at the bottom of the cave for too long,” Ambane said.

But, he said, the origin of the corpse could not be confirmed yet because it had decomposed beyond recognition.

“Members of the Western Highlands police are at the scene collecting hair samples and other necessary clues to confirm the identity of the man,” Ambane said.

“It would be difficult to remove the body without special assistance.”

He said locals were claiming that the corpse was of an Asian miner looking for precious stones and gold.

But Ambane could not confirm reports until proper tests and examinations were conducted on the samples collected.

The locals had not reported anyone missing from their communities.

 

 

Villagers struggle after hailstorm

By ELIAS LARI

 

MORE than 50 farmers from Keta and Mungupa village outside Mt Hagen, Western Highlands, have been hit hard by a sudden hailstorm over the weekend, The National reports.

The hailstorm and associated heavy rain lashed the area on Saturday, destroying food gardens, mostly fruit and vegetables for the town market.

Thirteen houses were also destroyed in the storm.

Cost of damage was likely to be several thousands of kina.

Two villages belonging to the Jicka Komopi clan had been badly affected during the three-hour storm which started about 4pm, villagers said.

The compact ice took two days to melt.

Spokesman John Herma, who is also a farmer, told The National at the scene yesterday that they were still trying to come to grips with reality that had been destroyed overnight.

He said the hard-working farmers had estimated losing at least K70,000 worth of fresh produce for the city markets.

Herma said they had planted a variety of food crops such as carrots, potatoes, broccoli, corn, lettuce and sweet potatoes, adding that vegetable farming was a costly business because of the various chemicals and fertilisers they had to buy for their crops and land.

He urged the government, through the national disaster relief office, to provide them some form of assistance so that they could buy new seedlings and chemicals to return to farming.

Meanwhile, Pr John Ku from the Four Square church described it as a disaster which hit the two villages.

He said it was the first of its kind for the villagers.

Ku said some people, whose food gardens were affected, would starve because in a month’s time, all food crops will taste sour and this will be very bad for the people.

He said people were still in a state of shock, trying to get over the disaster.

Understanding carbon and carbon trade

By NALAU BINGEDING

This article complements the article “Carbon trade is tightly regulated” by Peter Donigi (The National, 20^th November, 2009).

Carbon trade

Carbon trade was originally developed to address the issue of global warming and the resultant climate change.

It is believed that through the carbon trade mechanism, it would encourage companies, governments, landowner groups and individuals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and trade their carbon credits on carbon markets for financial benefits; on the same subject, some voluntary carbon markets provide social and environmental benefits instead of financial benefits.

In the case of tropical rainforest nations we are responsible for 20 – 25% of the total man-made greenhouse gas emissions, thus carbon trade would be an incentive for us to reduce damage to our rainforests or to retain them for monetary benefits.

In Papua New Guinea, individuals and the government have swooped at the opportunity provided by carbon trade because we think that it is a chance to make quick bucks and get rich overnight.

We have now put the economic benefits of carbon trade before its social and environmental benefits, thus we have got the order of the whole concept wrong.

Carbon trade was originally designed to address the environmental problem of climate change, which experts believe, if not addressed properly and in time, could lead to a myriad of social, economic and environmental problems.

Thus, the environmental and social benefits of carbon trade must take precedence over its’ economic benefits, not the other way around.

One of the points Mr Donigi highlighted in his article was that carbon trade must be done in accordance with the rules of the Kyoto Protocol or the Voluntary Carbon Markets.

It must be understood by carbon cowboys, landowner groups, individuals and the PNG Government that all carbon transactions will be regulated by these two markets, and there is no room for corrupt deals.

People sitting on the panels of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Convention Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the different boards of the Voluntary Carbon Markets are experts on forests, climate, economics, social science, and many science disciplines.

Therefore, what we do will always come under the scrutiny of these experts.

We cannot simply assume that we can go pass the scanning machines without being detected. People on the voluntary or regulated market boards or panels of the IPCC and UNFCCC are experts in their own right and many of them know more about our economy and forests than ourselves, so we should be careful with how we go about quantifying, managing and trading forest carbon credits from this country.

What we do in terms of carbon trade should be in line with what the voluntary or regulated markets have set out to do.

If we err in what we do, it would be an international disgrace, and this could have adverse impacts on our future endeavors to trade our carbon credits for money and contribute to the international effort in mitigating climate change.

So let us go by the books, and not do things on an ad hoc basis to satisfy our egos.

Carbon in plants

Carbon is a chemical element that is present in both living and non-living things.

The carbon in non-living things is known as the inorganic carbon, or lifeless carbon.

In living things the carbon is known as the organic carbon, and it circulates within an ecosystem.

In living things the percentage of carbon varies from species to species. In some species there is more carbon, while others contain less carbon.

In plants there is more carbon in woody plants like trees than in herbaceous plants like banana.

In plant species carbon content is very much linked to its’ lignin content.

Lignin is an unstructured substance that is regarded as the gluing substance that bonds together cells in plant tissue.

During development of a plant, lignin glues together cell walls in the plant tissue – this process is known as lignification.

In herbaceous plant species like grass and bananas very little lignifications takes place in their systems, so their carbon content is usually very low.

Herbaceous plant tissues contain mostly water, with very little carbon and other substances.

The wood of very old coconut trees has high lignin content, thus its’ wood is of high density and has a high carbon content.

The soft, inner core of very old coconut trees, known as the pit, contains mostly water and has less carbon.  

Dry coconut shell is high in lignin content, and so is high in carbon.

Young coconut trees and fruits contain mostly water in their tissues and therefore contain less lignin and carbon, but as the tree and its fruit gradually mature their carbon contents increase correspondingly.

Carbon in trees

Preliminary research carried out by the Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute has shown that wood of tree species with high lignin content were more durable than wood of tree species with low lignin content.

Dark colored, high density woods generally contained relatively high lignin contents. 

Moreover, the study also suggested that the lignin content for our tropical hardwoods is higher than those of tree species in temperate forests.

Lignin has no structure but is held together by chemical bonds in which the attractive force between atoms is created by the sharing of electrons.

The bonds that hold lignin together are carbon bonds, which constitute much of the lignin structure.

Therefore, trees with high lignin content are most likely to be high in carbon content.

Pine trees like Hoop, Klinkii and Kauri pine (also known as copal gum tree) contain what are known as resins or gums.

These substances are made up of polyphenols, which are high in carbon content.

Burning of gums or resins exudated by pine trees will emit a lot of carbon.

The copal gum trees in the April Salume area of the Hunstein Range in East Sepik province are valuable forest resources that can be tapped for their gum.

This gum was once used for vanish in the building industry, but due to synthetic vanish flooding the market the use of copal gum has since diminished.

Estimating our forest carbon stock

Papua New Guinea has 29 million hectares of natural forests, thus it is no easy task to estimate the carbon stock for our forest. It would take a lot of resources, effort and time to inventory the forest biomass and estimate the carbon stock for our forest.

The Papua New Guinea National Forest Authority carries out timber stock inventory for Forest Management Agreement areas throughout the country. Forest Management Agreement areas are usually about 300 thousand hectares and can be easily surveyed within a few months.

However, carbon stock inventory would require a lot of resources, effort and time because it involves inventorying biomass above and belowground, carbon in the soil, carbon in deadwood and leaf litter, and the inventory would have to cover a certain percentage of our 29 million of hectares of forest.

To do an inventory of forest biomass for the estimation of our forest carbon stock, it would be more easily managed using satellite technology in combination with ground truthing work.

Without satellite technology, forest inventories for estimation of biomass would be an impossible task.

Satellite technology has improved immensely in the last few decades and biomass estimation for tropical forests is now done using this technology.

Further, satellite technology is constantly improving and the accuracy of the technology is getting better and better every time.

In order to obtain reliable estimates of carbon stocks for our forests, we will have to stratify forests according to forest types or other ecological attributes and inventory them separately.

Each forest type or ecological attribute will have to have a separate a carbon stock estimate.

For each forest type or ecological attribute we will have to develop what are known as “allometric equations” and use those to estimate their respective biomasses.  

Allometric equations are usually derived by sampling a representative population of trees from within a forest type or an ecological attribute.

Once the respective forest biomass estimates for each forest type or ecological attribute have been obtained, these biomass estimates are multiplied by a forest specific or IPCC default biomass conversion factor to obtain the carbon stock estimate for the forest type in question.

Currently, forest carbon stock in PNG can be estimated by multiplying the estimated biomass for a forest type or ecological attribute with the IPCC (2006) default value of 0.5.

The idea that is promulgated is that carbon content of a forest is about half of the total biomass estimate.

This assumption is based on biomass work done in the northern hemisphere, in which carbon estimates from a tonne of biomass range between 0.45 – 0.5.

However, our forest biomass varies significantly between forest types or ecological attribute and therefore there is a need to derive reliable biomass conversion factors to estimate the carbon stock for each forest type.

A forest is made up of many plant species, from large trees to very small herbs on the forest floor, and to do an inventory of all the plants species is a mammoth task.

Research done by forest scientists have shown that 95 – 96 percent of the biomass in forests is found in trees alone.

The other 4 – 5 percent of the forest biomass is found in the other plant species.

Statistical tests carried out on these figures have shown that biomass of trees is highly significant and is representative of the total biomass in a forest type.

Thus forest biomass is usually derived from forest trees, not biomass of other plant species in the forests.

Carbon is also found in forest litter and dead wood on the forest floor and in the soil.

These pools of carbon are somewhat easy to measure using standard scientific instruments or well established forestry techniques, thus carbon content for each forest type can be easily estimated. Representative samples can be used to derive “allometric equations” for each forest type.

Then these allometric equations can be used along with satellite technology to estimate the carbon content of the soil and dead matter for each forest type.

Estimate of underground biomass in forest types is usually estimated at 10 – 20% of the aboveground biomass.

These estimates are also based on work done in the northern hemisphere.

Therefore, it may underestimate the value of biomass and subsequently carbon content in tropical forests.

Former forestry students at Unitech did some root washing work with Professor Bob Johns and George Vatasan in the Morobe Province in the 1990s, and have made some rough estimates of belowground biomass.

Our estimates of belowground biomass ranged between 30 – 40% of the aboveground biomass, which is much higher than the current IPCC default value of 10 – 20%.

Personally, I believe the estimate we derived using our root washing experiments are more reliable, but more scientific research has to be carried out in this area to verify our estimates.

Concluding Remarks

Unless we understand the basic idea behind carbon trade we could be doing things on an ad hoc basis and create all sorts of problems on the national and international scene.

Consequently, this could lead to the name of the country being tarnished on the international arena if something disgraceful happens.

Most forest scientists and biologists are well versed on the science and technology involved in biomass and carbon stock estimation.

However, because carbon trade and other issues pertaining to climate change have been dragged here and there by the government and given to people who have no idea on these issues, forest scientists and biologists have been reluctant to come out and share what they already know or contribute to all the fuss going on.

Therefore, if we are to succeed in carbon trade and other issues pertaining to climate change, appropriate organizations should be identified and relevant issues should be given to them to deal with.

In so doing, the relevant organisations would be doing what they are supposed to do more professionally because it is part of their profession, and they would do it with pride and dignity.

What has transpired so far with carbon trade and climate change in this country is due to the wrong people being given the wrong issues to deal with.

Moreover, because these people lack the technical knowledge but are more interested in the money involved in carbon trade than the work they are supposed do, we have seen nothing constructive being done to date.

Consequently, our country is way behind most members of the Coalition of Rainforest Nations in terms of climate change, REDD and carbon trade development.

Nalau Bingeding is a Research Fellow in the Social and Environmental Studies Division at the National Research Institute

Grade 10 exams are on

Grade 10 students throughout the country will sit for their national examinations beginning today, The National reports.
At the Gordon Secondary School in NCD, students were busy cleaning and tidying up the examination halls and getting the chairs and other exams logistics prepared for today. 

The exams will run for 10 days with students sitting for eight different papers, under the reformed outcome-based education curriculum, unlike the four core subjects in the past. – Nationalpic by AURI EVA

Businesswomen urged to support one another

WOMEN entrepreneurs in the country have been urged to support one another to achieve business targets and contribute to the country’s economy, The National reports.

The advice came yesterday from two prominent women – PNG Women in Business president Janet Sape and Women in Agriculture president Marie Linibi.

Both women were recently in Nagoya, Japan, for the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) women’s entrepreneurship summit hosted by the Japan and US governments as an opportunity for women to get together, network and share ideas.

Sape said the summit had brought many high profile women from around the world who were vice-ministers and other senior positions in their governments, vice-presidents, managing directors and many more. 

“This meet showed me that we, in PNG and the Pacific, have a long way to go before we can become like one of these women.

“And I saw that this is not a deterrent, but an encouragement for us to work hard to achieve this dream,” she said.

Linibi said they were  now encouraged to reach out to all the women in various sectors such as those in mining, informal markets, fisheries, agriculture, among others,  to all join and make this work.

Sape said New Zealand deputy secretary Amanda Ellis had pledged to assist PNG women overcome business hardships after she spoke on the subject at the summit.

Hospitals in crisis

Mt Hagen latest target of repeated attacks on staff

By JAMES APA GUMUNO

ANOTHER major hospital is in strife – this time it is Mt Hagen General Hospital in the Western Highlands which has turned away the sick and closed its outpatient wing yesterday following the attempted rape of a nurse at the weekend, The National reports.

Neighbouring Madang’s Modilon General Hospital is still embroiled in a dispute between management and staff over the appointment of hospital CEO Christine Gawi which is now before the court.

And, Port Moresby General Hospital has a morgue full of bodies which it could not empty because relatives were refusing to claim their loved ones while St John Ambulance and City Hall wanted payment up front for transportation of bodies and mass burial at the 9-Mile cemetery.

The latest incident in Mt Hagen comes days after the PNG Nurses Association elected its new national and branch executives who vowed to fight for better pay and working conditions.

The hospital’s CEO Dr James Kintwa said staff had closed the outpatient department in protest over an attack on the nurse.

Metropolitan commander Chief Insp John Kale said a complaint had been lodged and police were investigating.

According to hospital staff, a man broke into the nursing quarters at the hospital grounds and attempted to rape a nurse on Sunday night.

Kintwa added that this was not the first time this had happened.

He said, in the recent past, staff had been attacked on the hospital premises; some had their houses broken into and properties stolen and one person even discharged a firearm on hospital grounds.

Coupled with this, accident and emergency staff were constant targets of attacks and verbal abuses in the hospital or when they attended to emergencies and accidents in the city and province.

The frustrated hospital staff said they were not returning to work until better security measures were in place and their safety was guaranteed.

They demanded tighter security, better perimeter fencing of the hospital and residential areas and maintenance of their houses to be carried out by the provincial government and the Hagen rural and urban LLGs.

Kintwa said the staff and management planned to present their list of grievances to the provincial government and the two LLGs today.

Whether the outpatient department opens would depend on a “favourable” answer to their demands from the authorities by Friday.

He said they also wanted to know how far police had gone in their investigations into the discharged of a firearm on hospital grounds recently.

In the meantime, other units of the hospital, including inpatient and accident and emergency, were operating.

Although the outpatient section was closed, the sick were being advised to seek treatment at health centres or private clinics.

Kintwa sympathised with the hospital workers, adding that he could not force them to return to work.

However, he stressed that Mt Hagen General Hospital was a central Highlands medical facility which was already under-resourced and the current stalemate with staff was compounding an already fragile situation.

Neither the national nor provincial government officials were available for comments.

Yawari backs Agiru on LNG and stability

By ISAAC NICHOLAS

FORMER governor Hami Yawari is urging all Southern Highlands members of parliament to join his one-time bitter political rival Governor Anderson Agiru, The National reports.

“All Southern Highlands MPs joining Agiru and his United Resources Party are not making a mistake,” he said in a media conference in Port Moresby yesterday.

“We have to stabilise the government until the 2012 elections.

“As Southern Highlands leaders, we should be working together with Agiru to support Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare.

“Let Sir Michael complete his term and, if he wants to retire or continue in politics, that is up to him and the people of East Sepik,” Yawari said.

He said that Southern Highlands was home to the biggest LNG project and he did not want politics to destabilise the project that would give huge benefits to the landowners, province and country.

Yawari explained that he did not hold any grudge against Agiru who unseated him in 2007, saying that Agiru would stand for Hela provincial in 2012 while he would contest the Southern Highlands provincial seat.

He said he approved his own Conservative Party and Kagua-Erave MP James Lagea joining United Resources Party.

“We need to stabilise government and ensure the gas project gets off the ground to put PNG on the world map.”

Yawari made this statement when thanking the prime minister for appointing Komo-Margarima MP Francis Potape as minister assisting the prime minister on LNG and climate change matters.

He said some people with other motives had manipulated the National Gazette while the prime minister was in New York to create instability in government and the LNG project.

Meanwhile, Agiru said he was still a friend to Yawari as a Southern Highlander.

He said he was touched that a former rival had spoken highly of him and supported URP, the LNG project and the government’s tireless efforts for the benefit of the province and country.

Villagers stop work at scrapper station

By JEFFREY ELAPA

LANDOWNERS in Kikori, Gulf, have forced the contractor and French-owned company, Spiecapag Niugini Ltd, to stop construction work at the scrapper station at Omati, The National reports.

Spiecapag had been contracted by Esso Highlands Ltd to carry out work on the PNG LNG gas pipeline from Hides in the Southern Highlands to Portion 152 near Port Moresby through Kikori.

Early last week, landowners at Kaiam, also in Kikori, burnt several CCJV vehicles and machineries because they were frustrated that their landowner umbrella company, Greenfield Resources Investment Ltd, was not awarded any sub-contracts.

They also attributed their frustrations to the government’s delay in releasing the business development grants for landowners to start spin-off businesses.

Gulf provincial police commander Snr Insp Reuben Giusu yesterday confirmed the incident.

He said police had been informed and had dispatched a mobile unit from Kopi to the area.

However, they could do little because the villagers had only blocked construction work and had not done any damages to properties which were all on traditional land.

Reports said the contractor, Esso Highlands and the landowners would meet today to discuss the matter.

Landowners also warned that the blockage would continue if their demands were not met.

The villagers had also questioned the establishment of Kikori Energy Resources, allegedly set up by employees of Esso Highlands, and its interests in the project.

China's irresistible power-surge

By ROWAN CALLICK in today’s The Australian


AFTER countless "dragon rising" conferences and speeches, Australians have grown accustomed to China's emergence as an economic giant to rival the US.
But the past few weeks have seen something new: the most important shift so far in the 21st century. History in the making. China has made its move.
In August it leapfrogged Japan as the world's second biggest economy. And it has started to make that strength tell, beyond the worlds of factories, foreign exchange and trade, which it has already ruled for a decade.
During the past few years, Beijing has talked of projecting its soft power, its cultural influence. But that was either a feint or was destined to be a flop.
Instead, China is now exercising its influence in the world of hard power, where it makes other countries behave in the way it wants -- and this is especially apparent in the seas surrounding China's 14,500km coastline.
These are the waters through which more than half of Australia's traded goods have to sail. And Australia is the Western country most enmeshed economically and socially with China. There is thus no strategic issue of greater weight for Canberra.
In the past few days, the US House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly for legislation approving sanctions against China, which Americans criticise for subsidising its exports by keeping the value of its currency low by buying large amounts of foreign currency, chiefly US dollars.
Influential US economist Paul Krugman says these subsidised exports are hurting employment in the rest of the world. But not in Asia, where many of China's trading partners enjoy large surpluses in their China trade, thanks to the products they send for assembly there. Australia's dollar is riding high in part because of the strength of our trade with China.
The US is in no position to launch, let alone win, a trade war with China. US rhetoric about currency valuations instead underlines its economic impotence.
Two Chinese thrusts underline the country's role as a great power in Asia and, more significantly, its willingness to exercise its strength.
The first move: North Korea sank a South Korean corvette killing 46 sailors; the US and its Korean ally responded by planning a military exercise, involving the aircraft carrier George Washington, in the Yellow Sea between the Korean Peninsula and China.
China refrained from publicly rebuking Pyongyang and issued an emphatic warning to Washington and Seoul that this would be perceived as an attack on its sovereignty. The allies took a step back, and instead exercised off the Sea of Japan to the east of the peninsula.
The second move involved the ramming by a Chinese trawler of two Japanese gunboats in the oil and gas rich waters near Japan's Diaoyu islands, which are claimed by China. The Chinese skipper, Zhan Qixiong, was arrested.
China retaliated by banning exchanges with Japan, cancelling all cabinet-level contact with Japan, instructing travel agents to stop offering tours to Japan, and suspending negotiations to increase airline flights. "If Japan clings to its mistake, China will take further actions and the Japanese side shall bear all the consequences that arise," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in New York.
A week ago, Japan released the skipper unconditionally and China sent a plane to bring him back. The national CCTV news featured skipper Zhan's welcome with bouquets, hugs from his family, and massed media attention.
This wasn't the end of the affair. China went on to demand an apology and compensation from Tokyo. A foreign ministry statement said, after Zhan's safe return: "This was an action that gravely violated Chinese sovereignty and the human rights of a Chinese citizen."
China is steadily building a huge naval force, with a focus on modern, fast, quiet submarines, many berthed in underground pens at a base on Hainan Island south of Hong Kong, with direct access to the South China Sea.
The global financial crisis has triggered a shift in the balance of economic power. And while there is growing debate over how the West can and should respond to China's strength, there is agreement that the levers for all other forms of power are ultimately pulled by the economy.
A leading Australian expert on Asia, economist Peter Drysdale, stresses that "economic size matters to political heft" -- a fact that can be overlooked in the US, many of whose leading commentators on foreign affairs tend to leave economics outside their analyses.
Ross Garnaut said in a recent speech on China as a great power: "China will be the world's largest economy when its people on average are about one quarter as economically productive as the people of the US", because it has four times the population.
Many economists are tipping this to happen some time between 2020 and 2030. Garnaut says it is hard to imagine the Chinese remaining for long less than a quarter as productive as Americans. In the meantime, the US has been stressing to China's concerned neighbours that it is not about to pull out of Asia.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has backed the Southeast Asian nations' desire for territorial disputes in the South China Sea -- which is rich in oil and gas, as well as a key shipping channel -- to be resolved through ASEAN.
China's news agency Xinhua responded that "superpowers often adopt the strategy of divide and rule" via such solutions. Beijing prefers to negotiate with its smaller neighbours one by one.
Influential Chinese commentators have been promoting Australia as a sympathetic mediator. China Daily noted approvingly that then foreign minister Stephen Smith called for tensions in the sea to be resolved bilaterally.
The newspaper said the Gillard government was thus "seen as siding with China on the South China Sea issue, which the US has wanted to internationalise".
Shen Dingli, at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote in a commentary for the Lowy Institute: "Like many powers before it, China's growing maritime interests overlap with those of others. By differing from America, which meddles directly, Canberra receives more respect in the region."
A fortnight ago, Australian frigate HMAS Warramunga participated in Chinese exercises in the Yellow Sea, from which the George Washington carrier was excluded.
The Chinese ambassador to Canberra, Zhang Junsai, told The Australian on the eve of his departure that Australia is emerging as an exemplar for China's fast-changing relations with the West and the Asia-Pacific region, "a testing ground in areas where we are playing an increasing role".
Recently, China has conducted extensive exercises in the South China Sea, where it has arrested hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen for fishing in disputed waters.
Indonesian analyst Dewi Fortuna Anwar says the "increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Beijing sends rather unwelcome news to the rest of the region".
Including to Singapore, where these issues are playing strongly. Ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh has written a new book, Asia Alone: The Dangerous Post-Crisis Divide from America.
Singaporean academic Evelyn Goh says the key question is "whether Asians are willing either to shift into a Chinese sphere of influence, or to facilitate a highly complex negotiated power sharing arrangement between the US, China, Japan and the region".
China is now the biggest economic partner of all its Asian neighbours. As Bill Clinton famously stressed: "It's the economy, stupid." And the US looks unlikely to regain economic dominance.
Japan's Economics Minister Banri Kaieda said shortly before the release of Zhan: "The Japanese economy's future performance seems to depend on whether the problem is solved quickly."
Japan's trade with China reached $156 billion in the first half of 2010, up an extraordinary 34.5 per cent from 2009. Thirty per cent of Japanese firms' manufacturing output is produced in China.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has warned that "we are now seeing the rise of a new great power. A growing China will pursue its interests globally: that is natural. [But] history is not overburdened with examples of how such transitions in geopolitical and geo-economic realities have been accommodated peacefully. We need a new way forward."
Andrew Davies, director of operations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote of the Rudd government's 2009 defence white paper: "We come to the uncomfortable conclusion that our major ally and our major trading partner are, at some level, getting ready to fight one another."
Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, who drafted much of the Howard government's defence white paper of 2000, has stirred up a furious response to his new Quarterly Essay, Power Shift -- Australia's Future Between Washington and Beijing, because of his prescription that Australia should persuade the US to accommodate China's ambitions, and should convince China to join a "concert of nations", including India and Japan, to guide Asia's future.
The core of his essay lies in the less contestable analysis that China's economic surge will form the basis for a great rise in its strategic power. When China becomes the world's richest country, "that will make it too strong to live under American leadership in Asia".
China, White writes, is "already bigger, relative to the US, than the Soviet Union ever was during the Cold War", although one difference is that China has boomed because of its international economic enmeshment, becoming a champion of globalisation.
White says that "if China's power displaced America's primacy, we will have to start thinking about our place in the world all over again", even though "it is easy to hope that, like climate change, the issue will just go away".
He says Asia is "a maritime theatre". But the Western Pacific "is likely to become a kind of naval no-go zone in coming decades", paralleling the economic "balance of terror" between the US and China, with neither wishing to push the other too far.
American analyst Robert Kaplan says while the US and other nations consider the South China Sea an international waterway, China considers it a core interest.
He expresses concern about the US being distracted by Afghanistan and the Middle East as China builds an economic empire based on a far-flung trading network ultimately protected by its warships: "the British Empire refitted for a 21st-century era of globalisation".
White says: "If we plan to get rich on China's growth, we had better get used to the idea of it as a very powerful state."
It is also a more predictable state than most rising powers.
Despite its often opaque governance, it is no longer ruled by charismatic visionaries but by committee men who almost chronically covet consensus.
One of China's nationalist thinkers, Wang Xiaodong, says that while China's present leaders are essentially administrators, when today's students eventually succeed them, "China will globalise its national interests, and this will affect not just our close neighbours but the whole world. It must gain the capacity to protect those interests."
Paul Monk, co-founder of Austhink Consulting and former head of China analysis for the Defence Intelligence Organisation, in a recent speech cited Lee Kuan Yew's description of Deng's resurgent China:
"This is not just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man."
Monk defines this in security terms: "The danger is less one of a large-scale military threat than of the gradual constriction of our freedom to operate in the manner to which Anglo-American naval primacy has long accustomed us."
He concludes: "The challenges we faced from Japan in the early 1940s and the Soviet Union during the Cold War were simple by comparison."

MCC out intimidating landowners again

Having threatened and intimidated their way out of one court action, Ramu mine owners MCC and Highlands Pacific, are following the same stratagy to try and get rid of a second court challenge, the Ramu Nickel Mine Watch website claims.

Construction of the Ramu mine's marine waste dumping system is currently on hold after MCC gave undertakings to the National court last week not to proceed with any coral blasting or pipeline work until an injunction application by local clans is heard on October 15.

But in the meantime MCC staff are out in the villages along the Rai Coast threatening and intimidating local people to sign 'Statements of Fact' (like the one illustrated below) stating they don't want to be part of the court action and know marine dumping (DSTP) is the 'safest way'.

MCC staff are particularly focusing their attention on Tugyag village which is the home of the court plaintiff Louis Medaing.

One technique being used by MCC to induce people to sign is to tell them that any relatives working with the company will be sacked if they don't cooperate.

Presumably it is the intention of MCC and Highlands Pacific to turn up at court on October 15 with as many of these signed statements as possible to try and undermine Louis Medaing in the eyes of the court and to intimidate him to withdraw his court case.

The first legal action collapsed when the original plaintiff's withdrew their case citing the conflict that it was causing in their communities and fears for their safety

Biological control of weeds in Papua New Guinea

By ANNASTASIA KAWI and WAREA ORAPA of NARI

Siam weed affected and its growth stunted by Gall Fly - an example of successful bio-control of invasive weeds in PNG

Weeds cause serious obstructions to land use systems worldwide.

Many introduced weeds are serious impediments to agriculture productivity by causing significant production loss and threat to food security.

These impediments pose immense challenges to farmers and other land users.

 Managing these weeds is a critical defy in any attempt to get the maximum output.

And Papua New Guinea is no exception!

While plantation agriculture and some subsistence or semi-subsistence farmers generally use physical and chemical control measures to reduce the negative impacts of weeds in PNG, the use of bio-control methods has been significantly effective in managing some introduced and invasive weed species.

Bio-control, or biological control, of weeds is defined as the use of host-specific natural enemies such as herbivorous insects and mites or disease causing plant pathogens for the regulation of the population of weeds.

Papua New Guinea agriculture is still reliable on manual labour for weeding.

Cultural methods are also used to suppress weeds.

The use of herbicide and manual means (such as hand-pulling) is practical only in very limited situations such as small subsistence food gardens.

 In smallholder semi-subsistence farming situations, it becomes necessary to employ chemicals with large numbers of labour.

 These conventional methods of control are not practical as they are costly, time-consuming and often labour-intensive.

In natural systems where farming is not important, but weeds are a threat to ecosystems or the survival of important native species of fauna and flora, such control measures are not feasible at all.

Bio-control is seen as the only sustainable and cost-effective means to control introduced and invasive weeds, both in production areas (agricultural, forestry and fisheries) and natural areas (natural ecosystems such as rivers and rainforests).

Once released and established in an area, a bio-control agent can take two to six years before the benefits are measured.

When it works, bio-control is permanent, cheap and self-sustaining, requiring very little or no intervention in the long-term as the weed and bio-control agent reaches a point where they regulate each other’s population.

In PNG, there have been 15 bio-control agents introduced for weed control compared to 42 species of parasitoids for insect pest control and four against snail pests.

Generally, weed bio-control has been more successful in terms of establishment and control of the target weeds compared to the effectiveness of bio-control agents used against arthropod pests and snails.

The high level of success of weed bio-control maybe attributed to the fact that successful host-specificity research was done elsewhere before importing into PNG for local use.  

Some textbook examples of successful weed bio-control in PNG include the successful control of salvinia (Salvinia molesta) and water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) in the Sepik River, the recent control of Siam weed (Chromolaena odorata) in New Ireland, Sandaun and East New Britain and the dramatic decline of the broomstick weed (Sida ) in the Markham Valley and Central province.

In the Sepik River case, almost 250 sq km of water surface was covered with the floating fern salvinia, directly impacting the daily livelihoods of river dependent villagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

People were not able to travel using canoes and even motorised boats suffered from continuous entangling of the outboard motor and heavy fuel consumption in heavily-infested situations. Fishing for protein became restricted and tourist access to backwater villages was denied due to the thick blankets of floating salvinia and the much larger water hyacinth in the 1990s.

 With the introduction and release of a tiny weevil called Cyrtobagous salviniae, from the Amazon basin in South America where Salvinia originates from, the weed population crashed from the high 250 sq km to a negligible 2 sq km within two and half years!

Life returned to normalcy for the people living along the river and others such as tourists.

A lot of awareness and publicity was made to the people along the Sepik River and other affected areas in PNG have acknowledged the importance of biological control. 

Similarly, the introduction and establishment of gall fly and Arctiid Moth have contained the Siam weed.

Currently, National Agriculture Research Institute (NARI) is implementing a bio-control programme against a major agricultural weed known as ‘Mile-a-minute’ (Mikania micrantha) in PNG and Fiji.

Funded by the Australian centre for International Agricultural Research, the collaborative programme involves the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (Fiji), Queensland Department of Primary Industries (Australia), and PNG’s Cocoa and Coconut Institute and Oil Palm Research Association.

The overall objective is to introduce bio-control agents to suppress the growth and presence of Mile-a-minute in order to minimise its impact on food security, income, and to increase national and regional capacity to undertake future biocontrol programmes against weeds.

One of the major activities of the project is to increase awareness of the bio-control to the farming communities and the general public.  

The bio-control agent used is a rust forming fungus called Puccinia spegazzinii which was supplied to PNG and Fiji by the Commonwealth Agriculture Bureau International, UK, after having collected it from Eastern Ecuador in South America and testing in London.

 The rust has been released in 14 lowland provinces in PNG since early 2009.

Scientists are working with communities in observing the progress.

Subsistence farmers and the commercial plantation sector can anticipate a positive outcome as the control materialises in the near future.

 Biological controls have been proven to be cost-effective and sustainable means of managing weeds for agricultural and land use systems and eventually enhance greater food production and improved livelihoods.