Agriculture support services project launched in Chimbu

By SOLDIER BURUKA of DAL

Fr Garia unveils the official plaque watched by Dr Lahis and other officials

The people of Chimbu have been urged to utilise their land and resources for agriculture farming which will help improve their livelihood.

Chimbu Governor Fr John Garia called on the people to be more innovative and use whatever little resources they had to seek income-earning opportunities and reduce poverty and food insecurity.

He told the people not to use the rugged and mountainous terrain, inadequate infrastructure, ineffective services and other issues as an excuse.

Fr Garia was speaking at the official launching of the smallholder support services expansion project (SSSEP) in the province last week.

 Provincial administration staff, farmers, women’s leaders and provincial leaders attended the launching in Kundiawa.

He also presented K40, 000 as counterpart funding to help establish the new project office.

The programme will be introduced into the Kerowagi and Sinasina-Yonggomugl districts.

Central together with Chimbu are the two new provinces to be included in the expansion phase after the project was trialed in Morobe and Eastern Highlands for several years.

 It was trialed as a way to address the inadequate and ineffective delivery of agricultural support services in PNG, and the approach included contracting individuals and institutions to deliver support services to smallholder farmers.

The overall goal is to improve the quality of life of smallholder farmers by increasing their access to agriculture support services.

The Governor, whilst expressing his appreciation to the Department of Agriculture and Livestock for accepting his province, said SSSEP would boost agriculture development and provide opportunities for the farmers to improve their livelihood.

He expected the majority of the rural population to gain maximum benefit through their involvement in the project and urged all stakeholders to support the new system.

Fr Garia acknowledged the efforts of many farmers in food crops, rice, fish farming, livestock and coffee who had worked tirelessly without government assistance to become successful.

He said people should not always rely on the politicians for cash handouts but try to become self-reliant.

Fr Garia said he never encouraged handouts and always gave out seedlings and farming tools to farmers who requested for assistance.  

The Governor also called on public servants to stop being bottlenecks and assist in getting the flow of services to the rural communities.

He said new concepts such as the SSSEP could work effectively if public servants were committed and honest in the delivery of services.

Chairman of Kerowagi farmers’ co-operative society, Jacob Kerenga, on behalf of the farmers of Chimbu, thanked DAL and the provincial administration for selecting his province to be included.

He said people had the land and resources but they were lazy.

 They also lacked regular extension and technical advisory services and hopefully this would change through the SSSEP.

“This is the opportunity we have all been waiting for to improve agriculture farming activities,” Kerenga said.

“How can we improve our livelihood if we don’t go back to agriculture- the backbone of our economy?”

 Kerenga said while the people were being encouraged to produce more food crops, there were inadequate markets available.

He said this was one of the constraints faced by the farmers and urged DAL to do something.  SSSEP project coordinator Dr Sam Lahis thanked the Governor for the counterpart funding, which is a commitment towards supporting the SSSEP in the province.

He also acknowledged the New Zealand Government through the NZ Agency for International Development (NZAid) for providing grant funding worth over K3.7 million in support of the SSSEP in PNG.

Questions about outcome based curriculum and outcome based education

By BAPA BOMOTENG

 

The outcome based curriculum (OBC) and the outcome based education (OBE) policy will forever change the phase and the scenario of high school education after 2010.

 The grades 10s in 2010 are sitting for two weeks of grueling exams. 

How bad was the one-week, basic core subjects examinations to be flexed out to two weeks?

 What new re-defined subjects have been included? 

I bet there is a good mix of everything in each of these subjects spiced with a lot of culture. 

 There seems to be less of international English writing and reading skills. 

With a lot more village-based practical activities trying to direct students to be village-based, land cultivation-oriented. 

Where does that leave PNG in the 21st Century, modern English-speaking world of e-world?

 Does it all lead up to Papua New Guineans applying to Australia must complete an English competency exam before being admitted in to Australian universities?  

 The results of OBC in 2010 will be known in 2012 when applications are processed for university entries. 

Will our students be strong in pure mathematics, science, social science and English exams for university entry?

Our village-based elementary graduates, taught by unqualified teachers, already are disadvantaged against all our urban elementary entries into high schools.

There is a big gap between the elementary scholars and private school students from kindergaten, grades 6 and onwards.

Will wait until these Grade 10s are let loose in two years time after grade 12.

 

Bapa Bomoteng

LAE

 

 

 

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