The Director of the Institute of National Affairs, Paul Barker, has described as "disappointing", the criticisms by Minister for National Planning, Paul Tientsin, of the feedback being provided by professionals with respect to the 20 year Development Strategic Plan (DSP 2030), and especially the agricultural forecasts which were included in a full page advert in National of 8th April, 2011. Constructive feedback should be encouraged, recognized and appreciated, not condemned, he stated, while adding, government plans should not be considered sacrosanct, and whilst there was certainly some consultation on the Vision 2050, it was limited for the DSP 2030.

Mr. Barker stressed that if these are meant to be national plans, not just government plans, it is critical that there is wide public participation and endorsement. Medium and longer term plans are valuable tools if suitable resources are provided to enable their implementation, but it requires that the targets and forecasts are realistic and well researched. PNG has had many plans and strategies, but, as with the MTDS 2005-2010, inadequate funding was provided to enable effective implementation (e.g. only K30 million for National Road maintenance for the whole country, although access was the top priority in the Medium Term Development Strategy). Unfortunately also the MTDS evaluation was not made publicly available and discussed to contribute to the development of future plans. He emphasized that the quality and implementation of plans is dependent partly upon both sound prior consultation with the respective stakeholders and their feeling ownership of the process, which they will be responsible for implementing.

It is widely perceived that a small team in a central agency undertook the preparation of the DSP discreetly, with inadequate feedback from respective line agencies and non-government stakeholders. For example, with respect to the agricultural targets it has long been pointed out that these are unrealistic, with 8-fold increases in coffee production, 6-fold in cocoa, etc having little link with reality or past experience.  When asked where these figures were sourced, staff at the National Planning Department staff stated these were obtained from the Agriculture Department. However, the Agriculture Department staff denied having been consulted at all. Meanwhile, the respective commodity institutions and other agricultural industry bodies stated firmly that the figures were unrealistic and that they’d also not been included in any consultative process.

Mr. Barker says regardless of the source of these figures, and who’s right and who’s wrong, it was urged that the respect public and non-government bodies should get together promptly to ensure that realistic figures are prepared promptly and mutually accepted, so that there can be targets which everyone cooperates to achieve. It must be remembered that agriculture is undertaken by farmers making their own investment decisions, based upon their own perception of returns to their land and effort. Care must be taken by authorities to understand the needs of these farmer, their potential and constraints which need to be addressed; many of these constraints relate to poor public infrastructure (such as roads and ports) and services, whilst others relate to natural factors, such as local land availability and suitability, as well as to options for the farmers (or opportunity costs – e.g. whether they prefer to grow vegetables instead of coffee).

If the bulk of the industry professionals say the figures are unrealistic (for various reasons) and need to be revised, these observations should be heeded and recognized and not dismissed out of hand. Maybe industry players are being too conservative and should be encouraged to see greater potential, but in all likelihood their views are based upon long and practical realities.  In the 1960s and 70s the world saw great application of top-down ‘long term plans’, largely emanating from remote bureaucrats in the capitals of the old Soviet-style ‘command economies’. In some cases the targets were totally unrealistic, with requirements, for example, to double rice production in a few years. Officials didn’t dare challenge the targets given, for fear of losing their jobs or worse, so in many cases the result was extensive falsification of statistics. It wasn’t even possible sometimes for the plants or animals, let alone the farmers and the infrastructure, to achieve the increased production levels required, but officials and departments/provinces would nevertheless announce that the targets had been achieved or even better.

False statistics are useless for everyone. Department of Agriculture and Livestock documents state that in order to achieve these targets it’s necessary to pursue forest conversion authorities (FCAs), which are the basis for the controversial 99 year Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs), which have been occurring lately (5.2 million hectares in total, to date). These have been largely without the landowners free, prior and informed consent, and which seem largely to be mechanisms to access forest resources without complying with the normal requirements of the forestry legislation.

These are not expected to result in real agricultural investment, but rather to undermine genuine agricultural investment, including partnerships by landowners with genuine agricultural investors (which are envisaged under the recent land reforms).

Everyone would like to cooperate to achieve major economic development and particularly to ensure broad-based opportunities from this development, including through positive improvements in agricultural production, but to achieve that requires a full understanding of the opportunities and constraints and the context of the industries.

It is vitally important for a State Minister of a department crucial to planning progress of this nation to be embracing of constructive input from industry professionals. Discarding past experience and referring only to modeling is unhelpful, as models remain only as good as the inputs into them. Consultation, mutual respect and cooperation is a better way for all players to refine plans and move forward than mutual criticism, and will best serve the interests of the farmers and the wider community.