Good time to buy shares

By MALUM NALU
The investment climate in PNG has never been better, especially for companies listed on the Port Moresby Stock Exchange (PomSox), according to Kina Securities Ltd chief executive officer Syd Yates, The National reports.
He said after a public shares and investment seminar conducted by licensed stockbroker KSL, at the Holiday Inn in Port Moresby last Friday, that more Papua New Guineans should get into investing.
The 21 listed companies currently listed on the PomSox are: Airlines PNG, Bank South Pacific Ltd, Bank South Pacific Notes, City Pharmacy Ltd, Coppermoly, Credit Corporation , Cue Energy Resources , Highlands Pacific, InterOil, Kina Asset Management, Kina Petroleum, Mahogany Capital (currently suspended), Marengo Mining , Metal Storm, Mineral Corporation (currently suspended), New Britain Palm Oil, New Guinea Energy, New Guinea Islands Produce Company, Newcrest Mining , Oil Search, and Steamships Trading Companies.
“Each day we see in the media and on financial websites the opportunities that are emerging not only for our mining and energy industries, but the fishing and agricultural industries which are attracting keen international interest and the building of new port facilities, roads and pipelines to make PNG industry grow,” Yates said.
“The communications industry is another attractive area for investment as we seek to bring PNG ‘online’ across its historic remoteness.
“If you are interested in the future of PNG then you should give serious consideration to playing a part in this, by looking at how you can, via share purchasing, be a real part of this growth.
“There is a lot to learn about sound investment and there are many opportunities to get advice through stock analysis and the prospects on PNG mining and economic growth.
“We are already seeing PNG’s retail economy through City Pharmacy’s continued growth, demonstrating just what investors can achieve in terms or dividend returns and capital growth.
“It is not all mining and resources orientated.
“We at Kina have a clear understanding of the opportunities which are attractive to international investors and it is important that the investors within PNG appreciate and understand the real opportunities which exist in share investment.”

Opportunities for national to invest

By MALUM NALU
Investment in shares of companies operating in PNG provides a real time opportunity for nationals to share in the mining and resources growth, which is now attracting international investment interest, The National reports.
This was the thrust of a public shares and investment seminar conducted by licensed stockbroker, Kina Securities Ltd, at the Holiday Inn in Port Moresby last Friday which attracted more than 200 people.

Part of the 200-plus crowd that packed the Holiday Inn last Friday to learn about shares and investment.-Picture courtesy of KSL

Syd Yates, chief executive officer of KSL, said PNG investment opportunities were attracting major investment from international companies to further develop the resources and agricultural industries of PNG.
“PNG is now a recognised global player with an important role in the global recovery programme following the disastrous financial crisis of 2008, “Yates said
“The positive outcome from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was the emergence of new developing nations such as China, India and Malaysia – who seized the opportunity to enter the international markets to obtain resources to fuel their own internal economic growth and development.
“As a result, the resources of PNG and other South Pacific targets were identified with the potential to supply a full range of resources for these emerging economies and as a result, major projects have been commenced.”
These major projects require funding and the opportunity to join with companies involved by investing in their shareholdings, which is a very practical option for PNG nationals to share in the growth of the nation’s prosperity opportunities.
“Many PNG nationals will gain employment from these projects which include the giant PNG LNG project and a number of spin off energy development opportunities which are emerging following further exploration,” Yates said.
“To explore and develop these projects requires the creation of new infrastructure - all opportunities for existing and new companies to be part of the development programme to create transport and engineering infrastructure to support these ventures.
“For the investor, there are opportunities to share in this unprecedented growth by buying shares in the various companies involved.
“If they are internationally listed companies these shares can be acquired through investment funds such as our own Kina Assets Management Ltd (KAML), which invests widely in local, Australian and international share and investment funds.
“If you want to be a part of the growth and transformation of PNG, then share investment gives you the opportunity not only for dividends from the investment, but capital gains as the global market continues to return to its pre global crisis levels.
“The share market is a clear guide to the growth of any economy and at the present time, shares in PNG listed companies are trending upwards.”

Mandarin Restaurant, Bintangor Trading, Goroka

Mandarin Restaurant, the best restaurant in Goroka, and Bintangor Trading, the best supermarket in Goroka, last Saturday, April 28,  when I was in town.
Try out at food across at the Bird of Paradise Hotel before you make up your mind.

Bird of Paradise Hotel, Goroka

The famous Bird of Paradise Hotel, a landmark of Goroka, famous for its food and bar, as seen through my camera lens last Saturday, April 28.

Book review: The Mountain

By MARC McEVOY of Sydney Morning Herald
Drusilla Modjeska made her name writing non-fiction. So how has she taken to fiction?
IN THE mountains of Papua New Guinea, the forest canopy cuts out the sunlight below where leeches, mosquitoes and other parasites wait to feast on your blood. When it rains, it can fall so heavily that it is impossible to see someone standing a metre in front of you.
Anyone who tries to climb the muddy tracks in this primordial world faces a huge physical test, as Australian soldiers in the Kokoda campaign discovered when they were debilitated by exhaustion and malaria.
In 2004, Drusilla Modjeska took it on with her friend David Baker, an oceanic art gallery owner, to meet the Omie, a tribe of fewer than 2000 people who live on the southern flank of Mount Lamington, a volcano to the east of the Kokoda Track that erupted in 1951, killing 4000 people. Baker, who died in 2009, had invited Modjeska to accompany him to meet the mountain people. She was 57 but had lived in Papua New Guinea as a young married student in the pre-independence days of the late 1960s and early '70s and had an interest in the country's indigenous culture. The Omie wanted Baker to show them how to sell their barkcloth art.
To get there, the two Australians drove from Popondetta, near the New Guinea coast, towards Kokoda before heading off on foot to the remote Omie villages. The walk takes a couple of hours for locals, but Modjeska and Baker clambered for 10 hours up and down the steep ridges and slopes in the oppressive heat.
''It is a miracle I didn't die getting up there,'' Modjeska says in her home in Sydney, where she is surrounded by a vast library and indigenous artefacts. ''It was very, very hard physically, but it was very beautiful. We were fully clothed - and I would be bright red - but at the bottom of the slopes I would lie in the streams until my blood pressure and heart rate and colour returned to normal.''
Modjeska and Baker were the first white people many Omie had seen. They were welcomed with song and dance and slept for weeks on bamboo mats in grass huts. But, most importantly for Modjeska, it was the first time she had laid eyes on the Omie's beautiful barkcloth, a pummelled tree bark with designs painted exclusively by women. The experience was ''groundbreaking'', Modjeska says, and inspired her to rework her first novel, The Mountain, which she had been writing on and off for 20 years.

The Mountain by Drusilla Modjeska.

Now 65, Modjeska, a former academic at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Sydney, is one of Australia's most acclaimed essayists and non-fiction authors. Her skill as a writer has been compared to Robert Dessaix's and Helen Garner's and she has won numerous literary prizes including several NSW Premier's awards for non-fiction.
Her first book, Exiles at Home, published in 1981, was based on her PhD about Australian women writers between the wars. Poppy, her 1990 book about her mother, was considered trail-blazing for blending the techniques of fiction and biography.
In 1999 came Stravinsky's Lunch, a biography of the painters Grace Cossington Smith and Stella Bowen that ''transcended conventional notions of genre''. A theme of Stravinsky's Lunch - the dilemmas creative women face in balancing the demands of love and art - appears in much of Modjeska's work.
Her new book, though, is her first foray into fiction. The Mountain tells the story of a group of people drawn together in Papua New Guinea on the eve of independence in 1975. The first part, set in 1968-1973, focuses on Dutch-born Rika, whose anthropologist husband, Leonard, is filming the lives of a remote tribe. At the new university in Port Moresby, they become involved with an idealistic circle of people who will shape the birth of the nation.
The point of view shifts in the second part, set in 2005-2006, to Jericho, a Papuan art historian whom Rika cared for as a child. He has returned home from Oxford University to find his identity among his mountain tribe. This part reveals the realities of post-colonial life and the repercussions of choices made 30 years earlier, particularly those relating to Rika's infertility and her tragic love affair with Aaron, a minister in the first Somare government.
In some ways, The Mountain is a sad story but it's also revelatory, since there have been few significant Australian novels set in Papua New Guinea other than Randolph Stow's Visitants and some of Trevor Shearston's stories.
The Mountain is not autobiographical but Modjeska describes it as a ''passionate response'' to having known ''this beautiful, heart-breaking country.
''The characters are imagined from a world I knew quite intimately,'' she says. ''There were several cross-cultural relationships at that time between young white women and the young new Papuan elite, and it caused a lot of disturbance … there had always been a tacit acceptance of white men with black women but the other way around was inflammatory.''
Born and raised in Hampshire, England, Modjeska, the eldest of three sisters, was educated at Sherborne school for girls in Dorset. Her father, Patrick Medd, was a barrister and judge as well as an army major in the Burma campaign during World War II. He wrote several books, including Romilly (1968), a biography of the British legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly. Modjeska's mother, known as ''Pookie'', was a housewife until she divorced Medd, went to university and became a probation officer, the story told in Poppy.
In 1967, at age 20, Modjeska married an anthropologist, Nicholas Modjeska. The following year, the couple left for Papua New Guinea, where he conducted fields trips and was a tutor at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby while she studied history there. Modjeska says it was where her education began and she first read Fanon, Achebe, de Beauvoir, Camus, Conrad and Baldwin. Other students became key players in the independent government from 1975, including prime ministers and foreign ministers.

Drusilla Modjeska says if there's one thing in her life she does regret it is not starting fiction earlier. Photo: Steven Siewert

''I just totally fell in love with the culture, the landscape, the people, and this great sort of moment of optimism,'' Modjeska says. ''When you look at it now, there is a lot that is wonderful but a lot that is very difficult, as we know from the current politics.''
The Modjeskas remained there until 1971, when they moved to Australia, later divorcing. ''The transition to PNG was enormous, but I am grateful for it,'' she says. ''My husband had said we would be going there when we married and you don't have to be Dr Freud to see that I fell in love with the first person who said he was going a really, really long way away. He was a really nice man and we are still very good friends.''
Modjeska never had children, although she is very close to her grown-up nieces Amy and Martha (who is visiting her in Sydney now), and her ex-husband's daughter from a subsequent marriage, Obelia, whom she considers her stepdaughter.
Some of the most powerful moments in The Mountain are driven by Rika's failed attempts to have a child. ''I suppose part of the mix for me in thinking about Rika was about not having children,'' Modjeska says, ''although the reason she didn't have children was infertility; mine was a different thing.''
But Modjeska says she still felt qualified to translate the complexities of having children. ''By the time you reach your 60s, as I have, you know a bit about love and loss and grief.''
The novel's mountain is fictional, but Modjeska's imagining of it was ''enabled'' by her relationship with the Omie, whose story and art - the barkcloth, or nioge - are a central motif in the novel. Like the good intentions of Baker in 2004, its characters offer possibilities to a people deprived of everything except their culture and identity.
Modjeska makes regular trips to Papua New Guinea and has set up SEAM (Sustain Education Art Melanesia), a fund that helps maintain the art and culture of the Omie as well as the Korafe in the fiords of Cape Nelson.
She is also working on a new novel. ''I have few regrets in life,'' she says. ''I don't think I regret not having children. It has been a regret at other times … but it is not a source of regret now. But the one thing I do regret is not starting fiction earlier.
''After Poppy, I think I coasted on what I could do. And I wish at 40 I had done what I have done in the last 10 years. And boy, would I have written some novels.''

■The Mountain is published by Vintage at $32.95.

Somare throws hat in ring

From AAP

PAPUA New Guinea's ex-prime minister Sir Michael Somare has said he will stand for re-election in June.
But the veteran leader has hinted he will step down in the coming parliamentary term.
Sir Michael, 76, made the announcement at a National Alliance fundraiser in Port Moresby last night.

Former PNG PM Sir Michael Somare has announced he will stand for re-election next month. Picture: AFP

"Many of you are thinking, what's this old man, this damn old man, going to do do next," Sir Michael said.
"I will campaign strongly for the National Alliance to form a new government for PNG. After 44 years, as I leave the political stage, I am proud to see our constitution is intact and our country will prevail."
Sir Michael's daughter and press spokeswoman, Betha, said the veteran leader would run for re-election but will step down during the new term.
Sir Michael cited his government's record of economic growth, saying it was a reason the 79 National Alliance candidates should be elected when PNG heads to the polls in late June.
He also said the government of Peter O'Neill had acted unacceptably by legislating in December last year to dump him from his seat of East Sepik.
Sir Michael has held the seat for 44 years. He was PNG's first prime minister, serving from independence in 1975 until 1980.
In 2002 he retook the top job and was PNG's longest-serving PM until he was suspended for two weeks in early March 2011 after being found guilty of personal financial misconduct.
He then flew to Singapore for heart surgery and was not heard from for five months.
In his absence, his political enemies sharpened their knives and on August 2 parliament voted to dump him as PM.
The Supreme Court on December 12 last year later ruled that move unconstitutional, a decision that sparked a rolling crisis culminating in a failed coup by Somare supporters in early January.
Sir Michael previously announced his retirement in March 2008, but went on to serve another three years.
The veteran leader, known as "the father of independence" holds the honorary title of "Grand Chief", but is also affectionately known as the "the old man" by the people of PNG.
However the national mood seemed to shift behind Sir Michael's controversial successor, Mr O'Neill, who has promised free health care and education for PNG.
Sir Michael's speech was made in the Dynasty Restaurant in Port Moresby's Vision City Mall, the same venue where Mr O'Neill launched his People's National Congress party election campaign two weeks ago. There are 43 registered political parties contesting PNG's 2012 election.

Morobe beats Chimbu in coffee production

By AUGUSTINE DOMINIC of CIC


Morobe has beaten Chimbu province to become the third highest ranking coffee producing province in the country, according to 2011 coffee production figures compiled by Coffee Industry Corporation Ltd.
Chief executive officer of CIC NaviAnis revealed that Morobe’s coffee production made a historical record of 91, 051 while Chimbu’s production fell short slightlyat 71, 174 bags with close to 20, 000 bags difference.

Farmers from the successful Neknasi Coffee Cooperative Group listening to coffee quality  from a representative  of  Fairtrade (Australia and New Zealand) Group.

He added, however, that production figures for Chimbu may not reflect its true status, as coffee from there was brought down to sell in Goroka and could be recorded under production figures for the Eastern Highlands Province.
Eastern Highlands province led production with 695, 312 bags while Western Highlands followed with 543, 893 bags.
The figures are usually collected and compiled by CIC through copies of sales dockets provided by coffee companies operating in each province.
An elated CIC Morobe provincial farmer training and extension coordinator, Simon Gesip, expressed great delight of the news and praised the effort of networking partners in the province including Tree Kangaroo Conservation Programme, Bris Kanda, Mainland Holdings, Morobe provincial government’s extension arm , all district agriculture officers and coffee farmers in the provinces for their dedication and hard work.
He said the achievement was through committed partnerships between all stakeholders.
“Another factor to the high production is the determination of the humble Morobe farmers to target selling their coffee in the high value international coffee markets,” Gesip said.
Two advanced groups are the Neknasi Coffee Growers Cooperative Group from Nawaeb district and the YUS Conservation Coffee from remote Kabwum district.

Two farmers from the successful Neknasi Coffee Cooperative Group standing near their coffee pulping machine.

They have connected with Fairtrade (Australia and New Zealand) and America coffee company, Caffe’ Vita respectively.
Other coffee farmer group in the nine districts of Morobe province, including Finschhafen, Wau/Bulolo, Menyamya and Tewae/Siassi are preparing to follow suit.
According to a resent socio-economic survey done by the National Research Institute (NRI), vegetables were the leading agricultural produce of the province, followed by betel nut and coffee.