A PNG green revolution is just wishful thinking

Sometimes it pays to call a spade a spade, as the saying goes. Unless we are aware of the nature of a problem, the solution may be difficult to find. It is one of the reasons this present PNG government has managed to get to grips with economic problems and make important adjustments that bode well for the future.

It was clear about some of the things that had gone wrong under the previous regime, particularly the unwieldy budget, too much borrowing and a lack of ongoing investment. It is also one of the reasons why there will be no resolution to the high crime rate - few people are willing to acknowledge how bad it is, much less get to grip on its causes. Because of that, action to combat the problem will not match the need.

But I make these references to initiate discussion on a vastly different issue that has been bandied around for the last couple of years - the green revolution.

In fact nothing the government has said or done is really about a green revolution and we could probably demonstrate that, at the moment, we are mainly indulging in wishful thinking and rhetoric.

The “green revolution” idea came up in the 2004 budget after the positive response to tax reforms and incentives in the previous budget for the mining and petroleum sectors, currently the two most vibrant sectors of the economy. As envisaged by Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare, Papua New Guinea’s version of a green revolution was meant to occur through provision of tax incentives for new investors. However, these were severely watered down in the actual budget and, in the process no big increase in agricultural investment is anticipated in the short to medium term especially in view of a generally high-cost operating environment and difficulty in accessing agrarian land.

But even from an investment perspective the green revolution term was a misnomer. The concept of a green revolution has been around for a long time and in fact the idea bore fruit back in the mid-1960s when famines were still prevalent in countries like India, China and even Indonesia.

It was at the famous Club of Rome meeting in 1970 that top world scientists decreed that population was going to overshoot the ability of mankind to feed itself because there wouldn’t be enough farming land for the purpose. There were great minds involved in those deliberations but, as recent history has shown, they were totally wrong.

The world population has continued to grow rapidly, but most countries have tapped into the green revolution, a scientific and technologically-based way of using high yielding varieties of various staples, especially rice and wheat. As far as rice goes, the most famous centre for such work is the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos in the Philippines.

One often cited case is the Punjab region of India, where the total area planted with wheat and rice grew from 38 per cent to 59 per cent of total farming land. However, wheat yields rose by 120 per cent and rice yields by 179 per cent in the 15 years to 1981 with output of grain growing twice as fast as the population.

According to experts from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the green revolution has probably had “the most dramatic effect on poverty in the developing world of any technologies developed in the past half century”.

They said a dramatic reduction in malnutrition has occurred in much of Asia and Latin America as well as in parts of Africa even though population has risen three-fold. Some studies covering many countries over a 25-year period from 1967 have shown that overall productivity in agriculture has greatly exceeded growth in manufacturing, being double the latter in the case of low income and middle income developing countries.

The new technologies have even enabled China, India and Indonesia to move to near self-sufficiency in food production. China today is the most advanced Asian user of genetically modified crops with more than half a million hectares of such crops grown commercially.

This is essentially what the green revolution has been about although some experts say future productivity gains may be harder to come by. Nevertheless crop yields in developing countries are about 57 per cent less than yields in developed countries - a gap that suggests that massive growth in output is still possible.

It has to be added that much of the green revolution has been due to government-funded research and development activities.

Clearly to talk about a green revolution in Papua New Guinea is less than meaningful because fundamental challenges need to be urgently addressed. As long as a prime property such as Wahgi Mek, once a prized jewel among the nation’s coffee plantations, remains in a state of disrepair it remains a sad symbol to the inadequacies of agriculture in PNG.

What about the disgraceful state of the coconut and copra industry, where production has almost fallen into oblivion? This terrible situation has been known for many years but almost nothing is being done for an industry that once was an important lifeline for tens of thousands of families.

How can we talk about a green revolution and higher productivity when prime properties are sitting idle or valuable resources are allowed to run down to the point of negative returns?

We cannot tell for sure how many people are currently employed in agriculture by the private sector because it is difficult for a lay person to translate the employment index figures regularly published by the Bank of Papua New Guinea. Anyhow, BPNG is showing there has been a 16.9 per cent gain in jobs in agriculture, forestry and fisheries between the March quarter of 2002 and the March quarter last year, possibly the biggest such increase in the past one or two decades.

But the latest figures to hand from the Institute of National Affairs show there were just over 47,000 workers in the agriculture sector in the year to June 2001. Interestingly the INA data also shows there were 10,000 more jobs in this sector in 1994.

In 2003, PNG exported 40,300 tonnes of cocoa but in 1996 the figure was 41,000 tonnes. Production of coffee in 2003 totalled 68,800 tonnes compared to a record 83,000 tonnes five years prior to that in 1998 and 65,000 tonnes in 1994.

Palm oil is the one crop that stands out as a success story with an output of 327,000 tonnes in 2003 although there was slightly better production in 2000 and 2001.

It is ironic because if we talk about a green revolution in the PNG context, the oil palm story fits in quite well mainly because of the consistent effort and tremendous research and development carried out by New Britain Palm Oil Ltd in West New Britain.

NBPOL, which is the only truly integrated agricultural company in the country, is at the cutting edge of biotechnological research. It exports palm oil seeds to many other countries and has commercial seed operations in Asia and Latin America.

For a variety of reasons even NBPOL is constrained in its ability to grow but clearly, PNG has the capability of greatly boosting output and productivity in agriculture. But, as I suggested at the beginning, maybe the real problem is that we do not know what the problems are.