Population Growth and Conflict in PNG: A Warning

See below, an interesting report on PNG’s population growth and the problems it creates. This dilemma is particularly important in areas facing natural resource developments. Indeed, one of the primary causes of the Bougainville conflict was a population bottleneck. A large generation of young people, who gained maturity in the 1980s, found core economic opportunities had been monopolized by previous generations. As a result they searched for new ways of organising their local political economy, one that would see a fairer redistribution of resources.

As we know this led to a bloody civil war, as neither local businessman or BCL would consent to the demands of the young people. We wonder then with all the new gas and mineral projects, whether 10 to 20 years from now we will see another Bougainville bottleneck. Of course by then Exxon will have pocketed the profits and the tax revenues will have lined the coffers of the corrupt elite, thus it will be left to the grassroots people, the PNGDF, the RPNGC and civil society to somehow resolve.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Population growth fuels conflict

IRIN – A Service of UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

GOROKA, 21 December 2011  - Unchecked population growth is fast proving an additional source of conflict in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a country with a history of clan violence and clashes over land, experts say. 

“Without doubt, rapid population growth is adding to the risk of conflict,” Max Kep, director of the PNG’s national Office of Urbanization, told IRIN, noting that various types of conflict are fuelled by limited resources, including a shortage of land. 

As PNG’s population nears seven million, comprised of nearly 700 ethnic groups speaking some 800 languages, communities are increasingly fighting over smaller plots of land, while city dwellers in swelling urban areas are clashing with nearby owners of traditional land, Kep said. 

Over the past 30 years, the country’s population has more than tripled, from 2.1 million to 6.7 million, government figures reveal. 

At the same time, the average total fertility rate of 4.4 births per woman remains one of the highest in the Pacific region, says the UN. 

According to a recent government task force report on maternal health, PNG’s population will probably double in the next 25 years. 

Pressure on towns 

Adding to this challenge is PNG’s increasing youth population, with more than half of the country’s population now under the age of 20, according to World Bank figures.  

“It’s like having wild grass lying around waiting to be struck by lightning for a brushfire,” Helen Ware, a professor at the University of New England in Australia who has studied and practised peace-building in PNG, explained, noting the risk of so many idle, underemployed men. 

Migrants - drawn to towns and cities for jobs and services - are fuelling population growth in urban areas, Kep said, adding that urban areas are now growing at an average of 4.5-5 percent a year. 

Some 97 percent of the country’s land is under customary tenure law, meaning it is reserved for traditional land owners and the state has no jurisdiction over it. Land owners often are unwilling to release land for urban growth, so PNG’s cities have nowhere to expand, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). 

The Eastern Highlands city of Goroka, for example, is facing critical land shortages which have caused rapid and informal urbanization, according to a UN-HABITAT report. 

Kep, with the Office of Urbanization, said a government initiative to encourage landowners to lease their land to municipalities is aimed at empowering them, with increased income and access to government services. 

Many of those flocking to urban areas today are the young. But with few job opportunities when they arrive, the country has also witnessed an increase in urban youth gangs, known as `raskol’ gangs, who often turn to crime, according to residents. 

Violent clashes have erupted between local landowners and `raskols’, Albert Sams, a 24-year-old health worker from Ifiufa, a village 20km from Goroka, explained. 

Family, community feuds 

Significantly, land disputes between family members and communities are also now more common under the strain of population growth, residents and international agencies say. 

“Villages which once were separated are now bordering one another, and conflicts are definitely arising through competition for resources,” said Chris Turner, from Marie Stopes International, an NGO providing family planning and reproductive services in PNG. 

In fact, in and around Goroka, fighting between families is also turning violent. 

“There are a lot of land disputes between families - some verbal abuse, and sometimes they fight with knives, sticks, stones or guns,” Sams said. 

Jeffery Korowa’s story is typical of large families struggling to live off the land. Hailing from a family of five siblings, the 49-year-old says all his brothers and sisters have had several children, leading to more than 15 offspring arguing over smaller and smaller pieces of property. 

“I’m already fighting with my brothers over land,” said Korowa, a nurse who owns land outside Mount Hagen, the provincial capital of West Highlands Province. “I can take my brothers to court. But I’m pretty sure if it comes to push and shove, it will become violent.” 

A Cautionary Tale from Nigeria

A cautionary tale by John Vidal for The Guardian (6/8/11)

A man walks on slippery spilled crude oil on the shores of the Niger Delta swamps of Bodo, a village in Niger's oil-producing Ogoniland. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Image

Goi is now a dead village. The two fish ponds, bakery and chicken farm that used to be the pride and joy of its chief deacon, Barrisa Tete Dooh, lie abandoned, covered in a thick black layer. The village's fishing creek is contaminated; the school has been looted; the mangrove forests are coated in bitumen and everyone has left, refugees from a place blighted by the exploitation of the region's most valuable asset: crude oil.

Last Thursday, a long-awaited and comprehensive UN study exposed the full horror of the pollution that the production of oil has brought to Ogoniland over the last 50 years.

The UN report showed that oil companies and the Nigerian government had not just failed to meet their own standards, but that the process of investigation, reporting and clean-up was deeply flawed in favour of the firms and against the victims. Spills in the US are responded to in minutes; in the Niger delta, which suffers more pollution each year than the Gulf of Mexico, it can take companies weeks or more.

"Oil companies have been exploiting Nigeria's weak regulatory system for too long," said Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International. "They do not adequately prevent environmental damage and they frequently fail to properly address the devastating impact that their bad practice has on people's lives."

Goi, 40 miles from Port Harcourt, is a typical case. Just a few miles from where Shell first found oil in Ogoniland in 1958, it is only 20 miles from Bane, the ancestral home of Ogoni writer and leader Ken Saro-Wiwa. People from Goi joined the great Ogoni protest march of 1994, when one in three people from the small kingdom of 900,000 rose peacefully against the company, preventing it from working any of its 30 wells in the area. Two years later, Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni leaders were tried on a fabricated murder charge and executed.

A quiet fishing community of fewer than 100 people, Goi was steadily weakened and then broken by a series of oil spills that, over 20 years, made the network of swamps, lagoons, rivers and creeks around it unusable. "People used to drink the water in the creek, fish, cook and swim in it. It was a perfect place," says Dooh. "We wanted for nothing, but the spills came, the tide washed in pollution from elsewhere and in 1987 a massive oil fire burned uncontrolled for weeks. By 2008, most people had left."

Dooh and the last people of Goi then finally gave up. "We kept being polluted. We could not stay any longer," says his eldest son, Eric. "Shell said they would fix things, but a contractor came and scooped some of the oil up and that was it. The spills just got bigger and bigger." In 2009, a third large spill made the last house uninhabitable.

Whether Dooh or anyone ever returns now depends on a court case in the Netherlands. Together with Friends of the Earth Netherlands, Dooh is suing Shell in The Hague for negligence. The Shell pipeline close to the village pumped 120,000 barrels of oil. It burst in 2004 with devastating consequences. The company claims that it was sabotaged by youths stealing oil to process in rudimentary home-made refineries – a process called bunkering. Dooh blames corrosion of the decades-old pipeline.

On Wednesday, Shell formally accepted responsibility in British law for two significant spills in nearby Bodo. Those were rare victories. More than 1,000 court cases have been taken against Shell for pollution in the last 30 years, but almost all are rejected, settled for a few dollars or remain mired in the legal system for years. Even when the courts rule against the company and fine it millions, it is possible for it to appeal, with legal delays draining communities of cash. One case against Shell taken by people in Goi is still in the courts after 14 years.

Ogoni chiefs admit that some spills have certainly been the result of bunkering by youths determined to cash in on the region's one natural asset. "It was the negligence of Shell which compelled people to steal," Groobadi Petta, the president of the Bodo city youth federation, told the Observer. "When livelihoods are destroyed, the youth go to places where they learn how to bunker. They are desperate. They learned from others to steal. It has been to survive." But corporate claims that Shell had been responsible for only 2% of the spills were an insult, he said.

The consensus on the delta is that bunkering and oil theft on a grand scale are condoned, protected and encouraged by a web of organised crime that colludes with government and political elites, the security services and people within the oil companies.

"This is a mafia. They have godfathers. There is no way so much oil could be stolen without protection. Communities get the blame for the spills and the thefts, but the top people are taking far more and are well aware of what is going on. The navy patrols the creeks and main rivers, so there is no way boats could get past checkpoints without their knowledge," says Kentebbe Ebiaridor, a field officer with the Port Harcourt-based Environment Rights Action group.

At the lowest level, villages throughout the delta have set up illegal DIY oil refineries. These rudimentary stills, consisting of a few old pipes and drums welded together, were first used for fuel in the Biafran war. However, they have become part of the survival strategy of many villages too poor to pay for electricity or transport. A few drums of crude are tapped off from old company manifolds, and the oil is boiled up in drums. The fumes are collected, cooled and condensed in a simple distilling process and the result is a low-quality diesel good enough for generators and some cars. But they often catch fire, pollute small areas and every so often are regularly identified and destroyed by the military – only to start up again in days. Government agencies condone them and take a small fee.

"The fact that these operations are proliferating in full view of the enforcement agencies is indicative, at best of a lack of preventative measures and, at worst, of collusion," said the UN Environment Programme report last week.

The brio with which the oil is stolen on a larger scale is breathtaking. Reports allege that top naval officers have private pipelines that serve as conduits through which they siphon crude oil, load on to vessels and ship to refineries in other countries such as SouthAfrica. Last year, a Shell man was reportedly sacked after it was found he had set up a gang to destroy well-heads and then get his contacts to clean up the pollution. In 2003, the Nigerian tanker African Pride was impounded after being found carrying 11,000 barrels of stolen oil and was held in custody by the Nigerian navy. Within months it had mysteriously slipped away.

Organised crime now dominates the theft of Ogoniland oil, says Patrick Naagbanton, co-ordinator of the Amnesty International-backed Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development. "The pollution has led to the proliferation of small arms, making the delta now one of the most dangerous places on earth. The arms come through porous borders. You can get AK-47s, Chinese, South African, Italian, German and Belgian arms."

Naagbanton conducts a regular survey on the availability of arms on the delta and receives regular death threats. "The arms trade in the delta is dominated by Ukrainian and Russian dealers who swap automatic weapons for illegal bunkered oil. It is driven by political ambition combining with an illegal economy and fed by oil bunkering, creating both direct and indirect drivers of violence in the Niger Delta region," he says.

"Every community now has a silent army. If the problems of proliferation are not addressed, the non-state armed and warlords operating in the region will undermine the region and turn it into a dangerous conflict zone where the gangs will rule at the expense of legitimate authority, development, security and progress of all," he says.

Back in Goi, Chief Dooh's son, Eric, was preparing to go to the Netherlands to represent his father in the case against Shell.

"The human cost of all this pollution is too high. After the spill, Dad's business collapsed, Mother died because there was no money to treat her illness and my brothers and sisters had to come out of school. I am not fighting for myself. This is a test case. Perhaps Shell will now sit up and be corrected after this week. I am fighting for communities across the delta."

A union for landowners? From defeat can come strength

In light of the recent decision by Justice Canning to remove the interim injunction placed on the construction of a deep sea tailings placement system for the Ramu mine, there has been a mixture of reactions. Anger and frustration punctuate facebook and other social networking sites.

On the other hand over in Waigani, Madam Luo Sho and the Minister of Mining are popping champagne corks if not literally, then metaphorically. Other companies such as ExxonMobil would also be glad that ‘sense’ has prevailed, lest landowners in Hela or other regions get their own ideas about injunctions and court cases.

Mining, gas and oil companies are complacent, overly-complacent perhaps, for two reasons. First, the national government is encircled by a network of corrupt elite – personalities in this network chop and change, but their allegiance to money remains. Public funds regularly drift off into the night, assisted by irregular accounting practices that have been tirelessly exposed by the Auditor General. These funds (and we are talking in the billions of Kina) end up being used by this national elite to speculate on property, hotels, casinos, construction companies, etc, i.e. short term industries that will ride the resource boom wave and leave PNG within nothing in 20 years.  These dynasties controlling the national government can, therefore, be relied upon to play ball with the mining industry, they have a political and economic interest in it!

The second cause of the mining industry’s complacency is the fragmented nature of the poor. They believe that landowner communities are too parochial, isolated and self-interested to unite – indeed can you imagine their fear if landowners from Madang, the Southern Highlands, Bougainville, Porgera, etc, formed a united landowners front, a union of sorts for ensuring all landowners, in all regions of PNG have their interests defended.

But such a threat to mining interests seems fictional at present. Thus,  mining companies only have to worry about isolated pockets of resistance in Ramu or Porgera etc finding a courageous lawyer or two, who possess the skill and resources to protect the community’s right to live in clean, free environments, undisturbed by the dictates of crude profit oriented industries.

In the case of Ramu nickel, this fear was temporarily ended by Justice Canning’s decision.

The appeal might succeed, it might not. We know that the national government and the mining companies will use dirty tricks – even hire goons to threaten landowners and their legal representatives. Moreover, they will bring in the high price silks from Australia and throw all the money in the world at them. We know they will also trolley in their own hire-purchase ‘experts’ and if need be legislate away basic constitutional rights.

That is why we need a united landowners front, a union, whatever you want to call it – one which can defend all communities regardless of their economic circumstances, education levels, etc. A group that is built on landowner’s solidarity – if brothers and sisters in Madang are being thrown under the carriage of MCC, then action will be taken across all mine communities in PNG in protest. Can you imagine that, MCC receiving phone calls from Exxon, Barrick Gold, Newcrest, because their operations have been shutdown by landowners standing in solidarity with their friends in Madang.  

At present the mining companies and the national government are united, and they have their own unions (e.g. the Chamber of Mines and Petroleum) – landowners are not. Until they are we can only run isolated campaigns against injustice, when what we need is a united front strong enough to stand up to the bullies, thugs and corrupt cronies who dictate the rhythms of PNG’s development.  


PNG is made up of a thousand simmering communities, we must turn this into a boiling pot!

First the Egyptians, now the Greeks, next Papua New Guinea?

Photo: Greek protesters hold a banner in front of the Parthenon

Last week we posted an article which raised questions over whether electoral politics in its current form constitutes democracy, that is does it enhance the capacity of each individual to participate in the economic and political decision making processes that condition their life. We suggested decision making takes place at hermetically sealed levels, which ordinary people are excluded from.

In Greece at present people are taking to the streets to express their anger over decisions taken by the political elites and bankers, which ordinary working Greeks are now being told to pay for by the European parliament, the IMF and indeed their own government. The question in Greece, the question in Spain, the question in the United Kingdom, the question in Egypt, the question in Papua New Guinea, is whether people can not simply express rage, but can covert this growing revolutionary spirit inspired by decision making from above, into creation.

With the father of Papua New Guinea stepping down from power, fears are arising over a constitutional crisis. The mining companies, loggers, banks and agrofirms do not fear popular participation, the people are too divided by poverty, by clan affiliation, by geography for that, what they fear is that the Waigani elite will become fractured, consumed by in-fighting, which will lead to political stagnation.

Like with the Arab world, there is a belief that Papua New Guineans are incompatible with revolutionary change. Papua New Guineans are too parochial to seriously challenge the status quote, too mired in the world of patronage, localism, clan politics, kinship networks. The question is can these emblems of 'fragmentation',  become a strength that unites people, under a national bloc that seeks to protect culture, land and environment from the coercive forces of capital and political domination.

The Greeks search for their answers, the Egyptians, Syrians, Libyans, Tunisians, Yeminis etc, search for theirs, each answer will be specific to the national situation, but the question is whether a general theme can run through all movements, to depose market determinism and enact a new world of social exchange for social people that takes as its guide human beings, land, environment, sustainability, future generations.

We will continue to challenge the big companies like Exxon Mobil through a peaceful campaign of protest and critique, as will others, but unless the life force of the powerful are challenged on a mass scale, any victory will be temporal and sporadic. Only a united, mass movement will create the environment for true participation in economic and social change in Papua New Guinea.