Asia Times: Forest for the trees


	July 5, 2001	atimes.com

Oceania

PACIFIC BEAT
Forest for the trees
By Alan Boyd

SYDNEY - Melanesians believe that their coral reefs rose up from a cataclysmic tidal wave in the darkness of time, sweeping their ancestors through the perilous seas on pieces of driftwood and depositing them on the rocky Pacific shores.

Pioneers in a hostile and barren land, they planted the seeds of a complex forest culture, and become one with their environment. Until, with the arrival of European colonizers, that environment was no longer theirs' to defend.

Now the land itself is in the eye of the storm. Denied title to their ancestral homes, the forest communities are disintegrating into a social cesspit of alcoholism, violence and unemployment, forcing the guardians of the soil to take their struggle to the cities.

Frustrations finally boiled over in Port Moresby last week, leaving four protesting university students dead and the Papua New Guinean capital effectively in a state of emergency. Government leaders charge that the students refused police orders to disperse. Human rights groups claim the protesters came under fire after surrendering, a version that is supported by some elements of the military.

The target of the unrest was a reform program promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which have become the scapegoats for every manner of popular grievance in recent years. Both agencies contend, not unreasonably, that PNG is living beyond its means and needs to mobilize more resources to raise living standards. Selling off state assets, a long-time IMF favorite, is among the proposed solutions.

PNG is resource-rich, but has never been able to sever the umbilical aid cord that colonial master Australia left dangling when the archipelago gained its independence in 1975, essentially because it has not had effective government. Not that anyone in PNG has really noticed. Rule of law for most of this pot-pourri of 850 languages and 30,000 communal groups resides with the tribal fathers rather than a remote political leadership that draws its authority from some vague administrative boundaries.

And therein lies the core of the problem. To unleash the national wealth, the government needs to deal with the nebulous status of the 3.2 million subsistence farmers - comprising 80 percent of the population - who occupy the vast highland tracts. Pending legislation would allow this land to be marketed on a large scale for the first time, thus enabling the villages to raise capital and cultivate cash crops in place of their cassava and sugar smallholdings.

But opponents, including much of the student movement, fear that most real estate would be swallowed up by big corporations and razed for mining operations, forcing tens of thousands more to join the urban migration.

Scaremongering aside, there is some justification for treading warily on the issue, as highland business interests appear to have played a murky background role in the Port Moresby clashes, possibly even supplying planes to ferry police to the site of the protests.

Twelve years and an estimated 15,000 lives elapsed before the central government managed to resolve a conflict between landowners and an Australian mining company over royalties that broke out on the island of Bougainville in 1989. Once PNG's biggest source of national income, the island is now shunned by disenchanted foreign investors and will be given autonomy, followed by a referendum on possible independence within 10-15 years.

Other regions are also fighting back, but few safeguards are in place to protect the interests of semi-illiterate tribesmen, whose bonds with the land go well beyond commercial self-interest. Breaking up the communal strata would tear at the very heart of Melanesian culture, which holds that the forest is the basis of all well-being and knowledge. Politicians might speak of rights of eminent domain, but villagers regard the land as a shared resource that belongs to no-one, but is available to all.

To their credit, the first generation of PNG leaders recognized this potential point of conflict and established a commission of inquiry in 1973 that drew up an ambitious code of practice protecting the concept of customary land tenancy. It was quietly shelved under business pressure several years later with a scant 3 percent of land titles settled; most of these were subsequently exploited for mining or forestry activities, giving grounds for skepticism over the latest government initiative.

Supporters of the IMF-backed reforms argue that the cultural fabric was irrevocably punctured with the arrival of British missionaries in the 1870s, who were the first to merge the tribal satellites into a formal social structure. Deeper changes came under the succession of Dutch, British, German and Australian colonial authorities.

Yet there are sound economic reasons for reversing this process, and even developing the land groups as the heart of community economic units. While it was undoubtedly poor prior to independence, PNG was mostly self-sufficient in food and had little of the urban social blight that has turned many contemporary towns into armed fortresses. The family unit provided for all economic and social needs, as indeed it still does in most regions.

Replacing the highland culture of shared wealth with a Western spirit of individualism may mesh with the IMF's growth paradigms, but it is a bad fit for a Stone Age civilization that has no concept - or any pressing need - of market values.

Micronesia should be allowed to advance at its own speed and in its own image: the image of the forest.

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