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.

Teaching boss commends teachers on International Teachers' Day

The chairman of the Teaching Service Commission Michael Pearson wants to congratulate all the teachers throughout Papua New Guinea on the International Teachers Day which falls on Tuesday, October 5, 2010.

He said, throughout the world, the average teacher earns the equivalent of US$1 a day or K3 a day.  

 The elementary teacher trainees in PNG in their first year of teaching only earn this much.

He also said an average teacher had no shoes. 

Many Papua New Guinean teachers are bare-footed or have thongs.

The average student in a school sits on the floor without desks, often, on a dirt floor.

 Many of our elementary teachers know this situation well.

He said the average teacher lived in the traditional house of the people or in shanties and so did many of our teachers in PNG.

Pearson said many of our Papua New Guinean teachers relate to the situations of teachers in the rest of the world, which includes the underdeveloped countries, developing countries and developed countries.

He said in all countries, no matter how poor or rich, teachers gave rise - not only to the farmers or workers of the world but, also the engineers, professionals, doctors, politicians and the leaders of the world. 

“A popular car bumper notice says, ‘If you can read this, thank your teacher’,” Pearson said.

 “To my teachers in Papua New Guinea, in some ways we have the same conditions as many teachers throughout the world. 

We are fortunate that we are, despite what may seem poor conditions, actually above the average teacher.

“But that does not mean we should be complacent but instead work to improving the education we as individual teachers provide to our students.”

Pearson said the government had asked for universal basic education. 

To achieve this, it is vital that the government of PNG makes every effort to improve the conditions in schools for both teachers and students.

This includes providing the opportunity for many more of our children to take on teacher training.  

We need 4,500 trainees to give the teachers we will need.  

In two years time – we will only have half of this number.

Classes need to be of a size where teachers can give children some “one–on-one” time.   

This is not possible in classes of more than 40.

Teachers’ salaries need to improve to attract and retain teachers.

“To improve the real income of the teachers beyond a maintenance income – that is, teachers should have sufficient surplus income to purchase things beyond their everyday essentials so that they are in a position to provide those little extras to help with the education of the children,” Pearson said.

He said currently there were many other attractions out there which offered much better pay than teaching.

 It is only the dedication of our teachers to their children and profession which makes it possible for our education system to survive.

Pearson would like to congratulate the many teachers who have served PNG for well beyond 40 years and especially those, who despite reaching retirement age, have decided to continue teaching for the benefit of the children.

“To all the teachers in Papua New Guinea, both in and out of the teaching service, congratulations on the International Teachers Day 2010”, Pearson said.

Wall of corruption in bureaucracy is coming down

By JAMES WANJIK

TIME was when bureaucrats collaborated with outsiders for personal gain.

When I raised serious constitutional law issues on a government entity created by a foreign institution, bureaucrats collaborated to have me removed.

The story "Juffa alleges rot in bureaucracy" (Post Courier, Monday, October 4, 2010 p. 12) shows the wall of corruption in bureaucracy is coming down.

Very law public servants swore to uphold are breached by foreigners with support of nationals.

Gary Juffa is a professional Papua New Guinea needs now more than the money-waving foreigners.

Keep him in the driver's seat at Customs and PNG will win.

Well done Juffa.

Peace with Vele

Port Moresby businessman and former politician Wari Vele getting a hug from community leader Pex Kuman on behalf of his political supporters at the Unagi oval in Port Moresby on Saturday, The National reports.

Community leaders and the people of Moresby Northeast had organised a reconciliation ceremony, called “wanbel 2012” with Vele to say sorry for letting him down in 2007. 

They presented Vele with 20 pigs, food items and various gifts. – Pictures by JACK AMI