Sustenance farming is what happens when reward for effort is just not there, except for the price gouging, paper shuffling, profit demanding middleman.

What the farming sector requires are co-ops that produce all the exportable food. And via direct sales, that eliminate the greed is good middleman, who basically kills the market. Simple truth, no market, no jobs in that industry!

As for mining and minerals, they're key to quite massive foreign investment and real development, and economic self-sufficiency in PNG.
Alan B.

The problem with PNG seems to be the people themselves. Agriculture is not the only hope, or any hope. People are the only hope, and PNG people don't seem to be up to the job.

Not that we should be concerning ourselves with PNG as we get that way ourselves. The few manufacturers we have left are gradually being ruined by the energy policies of the political class of all brands. The current government is jacking up energy prices with one hand, and using people's own tax money with the other hand to help them pay the bills. What's not out out taxes, is out of borrowings.

The Socialists Albanese government seems to have adopted that old PNG cargo cult mentality. It won't be long before we find ourselves doing lots of things a la PNG.

The problem harks back to the Whitlam era, when ideology trumped common sense every time. We gave hundreds of millions to PNG to buy out white planters, & give the plantations to the locals. The locals in almost all cases had never worked the plantations, with labour imported from areas like the Sepic river area.

The PNG government finally stopped it when they found every 30 tom a month plantation given to the local villages quickly reduced to 3 ton every few months. In many places the copra boats stopped calling. The locals just weren't interested in buying & running generator plants, tractors, 2 way radios building air strips & all the other things the white planter needed money for, so production virtually stopped.

They quickly noticed the reduction in copra exports & the foreign exchange, & stopped the practice, but it was a bit late, & many decided to get out anyway.

A mate was the District Officer at Pomio in New Britain. It was a more successful area for local owned plantation, possibly because of his efforts, but still offered little employment opportunities. He reckoned the greatest problem in the area was education. The kids learned to read, read the papers, learned about life in the cities, & were discontented. Even if they went to the cities they had virtually no chance of getting a job, they were still "bush Kanakas" to the urban locals.

Continued

Continued.

I had a better than average educated kid get a job as a store man with us. He turned up in new quality expensive shirt & jeans every Monday. I asked him how he could afford this. It turned out he was the son of the chief of the Duke of York islands, probably the most beautiful group I've seen, about 35 miles out of Rabaul, so why was he working for us? The answer "he was going to become Chief & needed to learn about the city to do the job properly".

Education for him was great, but useless for most of the islanders. The islands provided everything they wanted, & gave then a life style most of us dream about for our retirement. They were not stupid enough to join the rat race for a few baubles.

They don't meed much in that climate. I had to live in a company house in Rabaul for about 8 months. It had a radio phone & 2 way radios so remote planters could call during the night when radio reception was better. I had a racing dinghy, gear & all my tools under the house. There were no locks on the house anywhere. There was a squatters village of couple of hundred people a little up the valley from this. Regularly every few weeks some would come & ask to phone the police when there was some kind of disturbance in the village, but never was any of my stuff touched. Firstly they didn't want it, & secondly they respected my stuff.

They did come regularly to pick a couple of buckets of avocados off the huge tree in the garden, as did expat neighbors, but nothing else was touched. I gather this was very different in Moresby & Lay, where the living was more difficult for out of towners.

The problem with PNG seems to be the people themselves.
ttbn,
That's the one thing Australia & PNG have in common !

Indyvidual

I did say that, "It won't be long before we find ourselves doing lots of things a la PNG". But, yes: there are signs of it now, with the government killing incentive and starting to put us on the public teat to control us.