LNG project to be targetted in 2012 elections

By PATRICK TALU

 

THE 2012 national general elections will be riddled with violence in the Southern Highlands, a regional police commander has warned, The National reports.

Gulf provincial police chief Snr Insp Reuben Giusu has warned his superiors in Port Moresby that there is a strong arms build-up in the province.

Giusu reaffirmed an earlier election-related report that violence would also sabotage the multi-billion kina PNG LNG project.

Part of his intelligence security brief, provided to the PNG liquefied natural gas project operator Esso Highlands Ltd, the police headquarters and the National Intelligence Organisation after his assessment on security situation in Gulf, bordering Southern Highlands, said: “My assumption is that from the past experience in the national election, there is a very high possibility of violence during the election in SHP.

“The use of firearms and explosives in tribal fights will increase because people have excess to such weapons.

 “I was actively involved in the Koroba-Lake Kopiago and Tari-Pori elections in 2002 when armed violence resulted in fresh election in 2003.”

Yesterday, it was claimed that the destruction of Curtain Clough Joint Venture (CCJV) heavy machineries and attack on its workers last week by disgruntled people from Kikori villages had been caused by the government’s delay in paying the appropriate business development grants.

Landowners had blamed the Department of Commerce for the delay.

They had also issued a 14-day ultimatum in a petition to Esso Highlands Ltd to address two main concerns.

They wanted the developer to give their two umbrella companies contracts for construction work and to immediately pay them their business development grants.

They warned that a no-response would mean a stop-work on segment seven of the LNG project.

 

Web-based SMS comes to town

A NEW website will be launched to revolutionise the way SMS text messaging will be delivered in PNG for businesses and individuals alike, The National reports.

The company website, called www.kundulink.com.au  will allow users who are registered on the site to send individual or bulk messages to any mobile telephone in PNG or anywhere else in the world within seconds from the website at a fraction of the time and cost of a voice call.

This will enable businesses and individuals alike to save time – and costs – that will have been spent punching in characters in their mobile phones to send text messages to customers, clients or friends.

When launched, Kundu Link will be the first and only web-based SMS service in PNG.

The website’s homepage declared that Kundu Link was designed to improve the productivity and mobility of businesses in the country by improving the way they communicate with their staff, customers and clients.

It will also give businesses the freedom to engage in communications that are highly personal, immediate and have a high reach at just a fraction of the time and cost spent on voice communications.

“Businesses are seeking simplified communication solutions to remain competitive in an increasingly mobile and technologically advancing world,” the website’s homepage stated.

“Kundu Link enables your business to send individual or bulk messages within seconds from your desk at a fraction of the time and cost of a voice call.

“With a large percentage of business telephone communications costs being landline to mobile phone charges, SMS is the perfect way to dramatically reduce your telecommunications costs.”

And, all you have to do is visit the website, register and start sending SMS from your computer.

Web-based SMS has been a big hit with individuals and major businesses in Australia and the rest of the world for many years, but this would be the first time it is made available to Papua New Guineans.

“Big businesses in Australia that have used web-based SMS to improve their business and business communications include Coca-Cola, Quantas, chocolate maker Cadbury, technology company Hewlett Packard and many others,” the company website stated.

 

 

Gulf leaders give 14-day ultimatum

By WALLACE KIALA

KIKORI landowners and the West Kikori local level government in Gulf have petitioned Esso Highlands Ltd to engage their umbrella company in contract work and to immediately release all business development grants earmarked under segment seven of the LNG project, The National reports.

In their petition, addressed to Esso

Highlands’ Peter Graham, the landowners stated that the company’s failure to do so would result in a stop-work of construction activities within the Kaiam ferry crossing to the Omati landfall.

They have given the company 14 days to respond to their demands.

In their two-point petition, the landowners wanted Esso Highlands to immediately:

• Engage Greenfield Resources Investment Ltd in contract works with the LNG pipeline construction; and
• Release all business development grants, earmarked under segment seven of the LNG project, to Greenfield Resources Investment Ltd.

Meanwhile, Kikori Oil Pipeline Landowners Association (KOPLA) chairman Bomsy Boviro yesterday claimed that the destruction caused to Curtain Clough Joint Venture (CCJV) heavy machineries and the attack on its workers last week was due to the government’s delay in paying landowners their business development grants.

He said although the Department of Petroleum and Energy had allocated funds, the facilitating government agency, Department of Commerce, had not release of the payments.

“With the full construction of the LNG project set to begin next month, there is a lot of uncertainty causing anxiety among the people; the people want to get their business activities off the ground,” Boviro said.

Police, in the meantime, are still looking for the suspects involved in torching CCJV’s truck and machineries.

Gulf provincial police commander Snr Insp Reuben Giusu said although no arrests had been made, the situation on the ground had been contained.

Finschhafen fight claims three

FIERCE gun fighting in Finschhafen early yesterday morning left at least three men dead, The National reports.

The first two from the coastal village of Kwalansam were killed by the hinterland Gaweng Labu.

In retaliation, the Kwalansam villages later in the day rallied and attacked Gaweng Labu and razed several homes.

Police source did not identify the site of the killings but said the deaths were caused by high- powered guns.

All three dead are in the morgue at the Lutheran church-run Braun Hospital.

The source also said there were reports of at least five other deaths before yesterday.

The source said both villagers were using high-powered guns, adding that police going into the area yesterday were warned to take “extraordinary precautions”.

The fighting was said to have started after independence over a land ownership issue.

The source said there had been intermittent clashes in the past two weeks with unconfirmed reports of deaths.

The source said more than 3,000 people from the neighbouring coastal villages of Kasanga and Ngasingalatuc and Bugem had stopped going to their gardens for fear of attacks. 

Residents at the district headquarters of Gagidu said the town was tense.

They warned that the fighting could seriously affect the start of classes at the neighbouring Dregerhafen Technical Secondary School, which will be starting its Grade 10 examinations next Tuesday.

Coffee growers and coffee dreamers- an industry governed by complacency

By JOHN FOWKE
 

John Fowke

The arrival of coffee into the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where it is the only major source of cash to a fast-expanding rural population, coincided with the arrival of roads, airstrips, Christian missions and the “gavman”.
Sharp, steel cutting-edges, the like of which had never been seen; the concept of saws, hammers and nails rather than bush-rope for building; matches, mirrors and copious quantities of sea-salt as opposed to laboriously-produced salts of potassium derived from ashes and from isolated up-wellings of mineralised mud were magic.
The products of some supernatural place in the sky where white people came from.
Soon, though, the Highlanders, like their coastal cousins long before them, accepted the truth; the reality that all these marvellous things were made by the hands of people like themselves.
 The word of Christ and the new right to walk feely and without hindrance from enemies upon the “rot bilong gavman” were new marvels, also.
And as time passed, they became convinced in large numbers that what the white “didiman” said was true.
That by planting the seeds from the small, red fruit call “kofi”, they might gain a source of the “moni” which was the preferred medium of exchange at the few trade-stores which had opened here and there.
In this way a huge social revolution, the like of which has scarce occurred so dramatically and in such a short period of time anywhere in the world swept the Highlands.
A social revolution, indeed a turning-point in PNG history- nothing since has provided so much stimulation, so much excitement, nor launched so much novel and productive activity.
Today, however, coffee is just something that’s always been there.
Young people, especially those living in peri-urban and highway-side villages know and care little for coffee.
The growers are mostly middle-aged subsistence farmers, who inherited their coffee from a generation now gone.
They are not small businessmen.
Not businessmen who worry about their cash-position and the condition of their fields or their livestock, like dairy-farmers or vegetable-farmers do in other lands where farming is industrialised.
Coffee has an importance, alongside and not superior to their crops of sweet-potato, taro, banana and kumu, and their pigs and chickens.
It is part of a complex system, an inherited system of living which modernity is pressing upon in many ways.
And today PNG’s national coffee-tree population is to a large extent aged and worn out- more than ready for retirement.
In other words, due for replacement by new young, vigorous plants which will do justice to the valuable land upon which they grow and bear fruit.
But nowhere is their any sign that growers, or anyone else associated with PNG’s second-largest agricultural money-earner is awake to the approaching death of what some have called “the money-tree industry”.
 Across the Highlands and the other minor coffee-growing districts something in the order of 160 million- yes, that’s right, 160 million- senile, unproductive coffee trees continue to occupy good land.
This is an emergency situation – one with serious implications as far as social order, health and wellbeing in the Highlands is concerned- and it is a situation which is not recognised, and for which well-based planning is not on the table.
The “think big” politically-driven policies over many years have shown no statistically-measurable result.
Here funds have been wasted on badly-managed central nurseries and in ventures like last year’s “coffee renovation project”.
 Here a rumoured K3 million was spent in buying tools from small, local hardware shops and distributing these to growers with little accountability and no apparent result.
There has been no recognition, in spite of frequent reminders by this writer and others with a genuine interest in the industry, that a massive grower-initiated replanting programme is absolutely essential to the continued prosperity of PNG’s valuable coffee industry.
 No recognition; no mention in the grandiose, “Golden Future” projects and targets which are announced regularly as harbingers of coming PNG-wide wellbeing.  
During the coming 20 years, the present-day middle-aged generation of landowners will pass on, together with their knowledge of coffee, and of all the traditional boundaries and customary usufructary rights to land now occupied by coffee and other permanent tree-crops.
No one is thinking about this so far as is known.
It is a looming social calamity.
All the talk about land registration is so much nonsense until detailed mapping of customarily-recognised landholdings and usufructary rights to bushland, hunting and fishing places, old communally-established coconut groves planted in the 1930s, and standing bush food and fruit trees is accomplished.
The situation which may prevail once the generation which still preserves all this knowledge passes is almost beyond imagining.
 Our extension-services and several generously-funded coffee related aid projects have always treated the coffee-growers as if they were little professional farmers, or persons ready to become such.
They have not taken a more thoughtful, sociology-based / traditional economy-based approach, one in which both the practice and the logic of the subsistence economy and the imperatives which drive it are considered.
 Advisory input has always been a westernised, we-know-best approach.
One where people who have spent years gaining degrees in modern agro-technology attempt to intermesh this theoretical knowledge with systems, thoughts and imperatives which have grown and been practiced successfully in PNG for the past 8, 000 years.   As for the fast-vanishing managed plantation sector, once hailed as the flagship of the coffee industry, this is faced with the effect of many years of widespread mis-management and impossibly high costs in every direction, besides an aging and generally poor treestock.
Producing around 6% of today’s export volume and buying and blending in a further 6% from surrounding village growers, this sector with very few exceptions is on its last legs.
One of the exceptions is the Warawou Plantation of Max Kumbamong, a life-long coffee man of Mt. Hagen.
Kumbamong, who began his career with Angco Development some 25 years ago, bought this abandoned tea-plantation which had literally turned into a jungle.
Already a successful coffee-trader with his own export company, Max has applied common-sense allied with practical, realistic farm practices to renovate more than 20 hectares of old coffee and bring in a further 80 hectares of new trees planted on cleared tealand.
Having restored tea-production over part of his remaining land, and selling the leaf together with bananas which are grown as shade over the newly-planted areas, Max can show all the planners and agricultural experts much which practical experience would have taught them if they had been interested and energetic enough to want to learn.
Aside from the capital purchase, his establishment costs are covered by the sale of tea-leaf and bananas, and rice which he is also growing.
 So much for all those who, like hungry dogs, howl for government grants and loans to help them become coffee kings.
 Coffee dreamers, all!
Very simply, the need is for realistic, keen, idealistic “coffee-evangelists” to carry their blanket, pillow, and a small supply of coffee, sugar and biscuits with them on friendly overnight visits to villagers where they ask for overnight accommodation and spread the replanting gospel around the fire, at night, when people are open and ready to talk and to consider ideas.
Seed might be distributed at the same time, but this writer is not aware of any large quantity of improved variety seed in existence in PNG at present.
Better then that however, being much more expedient and easier and cheaper, growers might be shown how to select and grow new plants using self-sown seedlings from below their own trees.
After all, PNG’s existing coffee, though variable because of the mixed practices of 400,000 growers and far too many badly-managed and uneconomic little factories, is intrinsically, as good as coffee gets, anywhere in the world.

Say it with orchids

 The Orchid Spectacular will be held this weekend, The National reports.
The show will see orchid growers and other florists flock to the Sir Rabbie Namaliu Orchid Gardens at the National Parliament grounds on Saturday and Sunday. 
The official opening will be on Friday evening. 

Workers were busy yesterday to get everything ready for the show with PNG Gardener Justin Tkatchenko using a hose to make sure the orchids are at their best before the weekend. – Nationalpic by AURI EVA

NDB to engage in retail banking

GOVERNMENT-owned National Development Bank (NDB) is going to acquire a retail banking licence to expand its operations, The National reports.   

This was revealed on Monday by Minister for Finance and Treasury Peter O’Neill to the bank’s stakeholders in Port Moresby.

O’Neill said with the granting of the licence, NDB would be in a better position to provide banking services to rural communities.

“The government has rehabilitated NDB so it can be positioned to obtaining a ‘retail banking licence’ so that millions of our people in the rural communities who remained unbanked can have access to banking and financial services,” he said.

He said the bank had made a strong financial come back from a period of insolvency in 2004 and is now in a better position to expand its services to the public.

O’Neill said the improvement in the balance sheet position of NDB from a net asset of K15 million in 2004 to more than K160 million this year was a positive sign for the bank and its clients.

Bank managing director Richard Maru said once the retail banking licence had been  obtained, the bank would start collecting deposits from the public.

NDB chairman William Lamur also echoed this sentiment, saying the bank “has leaped from great debts and is now in a better position serve its clients”.

He said the next aim of the bank was to operate on its own with little or no help from the state.