2. Start at the beginning

This blog describes the background to the project, the locality in the Southern Highlands, the idea of working with the NGO B4D and big business to kick start small businesses in PNG and, with only a little bit of tweaking, show the local villagers how to produce food in a different way and grow regional wealth.

The helicopter came in over the tree covered mountains. Deep down in the valleys the silver lines of rivers glistened in the sun. Below lay the single straight track of red ground where the gas pipeline ran.  On the cleared ridge lines there were occasional collections of round thatched dwellings and wisps of smoke from cooking fires.  The little mounds of kau kau (sweet potato) gardens lay in orderly rows; each mound about two metres long and one metre wide.  Bananas trees and rows of corn were evident.  It was green in a dozen different shades nearly everywhere but the black of burnt off vegetation to ready land for replanting was evident.  This land has been farmed for 10,000 years.

We flew over the Tagari River and, as we neared the helipad at the Hides Oil Search Limited (OSL) camp we crossed the Highlands Highway. This was a well formed dirt and rock road linking the gas pipeline and the provincial capital, Tari, with the major centres of Mendi, Hagen, Goroka and Lae on the northern coast, the last about a two-day drive away.

 And then, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but clearly home to many people, we were right over the OSL camp, an orderly collection of administration buildings, refectory, dongas for staff accommodation, fuel tanks and vehicles behind a high mesh security fence with guards at the gate. The complex was surrounded by village houses tucked in and partly hidden amongst forest trees, banana trees and gardens. The Hides camp seemed indeed the end of the road.

The helicopter settled down. We unloaded our kit and some other supplies including, in flat cardboard boxes, some additional passengers - day- old chickens. Moments later the helicopter took off again, laden with a fly- in fly- out mining crew on their one-hour flight out to Moro and then Cairns or Moresby for their break.

So, here we were on a helipad at the Hides Gas camp, Nogoli, in Hela province ready to work out how we could develop a pig project to benefit the local villagers.  The idea was, eventually, to get things to a stage where local landowner companies (Landcos) could invest in an animal production business that could grow, deliver employment opportunities long term and provide income growth for local people.

In the last 50 years of global food output, pig and poultry production had grown from a few sideline or scavenging animals  to intensive  farms applying well researched management systems and diets. It was clear, at least to me, that the sort of pig project most likely to deliver success was one that used the cheapest feed ingredients to formulate balanced diets and relied on villagers for relatively labour and low capital inputs.

Through the last parts of the 20th century oil and gas exploration companies found prodigious quantities of gas in PNG.  By 2015 they had completed, at breakneck speed, a pipeline connecting well heads in the Southern Highlands, south to terminals in the Gulf of Papua, for export to the rest of the world. In its five- year construction period the oil and gas companies had employed thousands of people.  Now that it was finished there were many people suddenly underemployed. 

That Oil Search was looking for ways to develop employment opportunities for the people in their pipeline catchment was a large part altruism but good part recognition that if they could do something sustainable for local employment it reduced the risk of tribal fighting, political upheaval and damage to their infrastructure. It also smoothed the way for further investment and development. And it reduced the risk of catastrophic mistakes. Resource or industrial disasters cost billions. Witness Exxon Valdez, Union Carbide India’s Bhopal, BP’s Deep-Water Horizon’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BHP-Valé’s Samarco dam breach in Brazil and closer to home Bougainville Copper and finally the tailings dam breech at BHP’s OK Tedi mine.

My view is that businesses understand the best, and possibly only way to create wealth is to develop and grow businesses, preferably small businesses that involve many players.  While they see advantage in development and are keen for it to occur, generally businesses lack the experience, time and will to engage in the management of large scale aid programs. 

World Vision and the Australian government international aid agency Ausaid acknowledged the goodwill offered by business.  To facilitate investment and guidance they formed an alliance with a group of Australian companies and, in 2007, established Business for Millennium Development (B4MD later to become Business for Development (B4D). This NGO aligned itself with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Its core business is to connect poor communities to global markets to deliver improvements in incomes and livelihoods through private sector partnerships.

The UN’s Millennium Development Goals gave the world, for the first time, a consensus about the most important development challenges for the first fifteen years of this 21st century. Previous attempts to encourage global cooperation had foundered because of philosophical arguments about approaches to alleviating poverty. The adoption of the MDGs bypassed these theoretical arguments and secured international agreement to a concrete set of goals and on ways to measure the international community’s progress in meeting them.

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 all 191 member states of the UN formally committed to the eight Millennium Development Goals:  to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat hiv/aids, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, better late than never, said that no-one could expect the international aid budget to pull the developing world out of poverty.  He recognized that business could make an important contribution to the developing world. 

I ran my own micro consulting business in a little coastal town.  We employed people, did our business in town,  invoiced customers from all over Australia and internationally and contributed to the local economy. The people I worked with on farms in Australia did much the same.  The same thing should be possible for people in PNG villages.  They could produce high quality food  (pork) for themselves, their region, their country and the world.

In the next blog I describe the opportunities for growing crops to feed pigs in Papua New Guinea.