By David Putulan

While the Oil Palm Industry in Papua New Guinea is preaching millions of kina in profit, it has come at a cost to the local inhabitants that once use to occupy the areas under oil palm. I am not talking about the environmental cost as loss of biodiversity through mono-culture is inevitable. The essence of this article is about the erosion of the social structures that forms the foundation for functional Melanesian communities. These social structures cannot properly exist when people are displaced from their land and forced to live another way of life.

In Papua New Guinea, everyone belongs to a clan or tribe that owns the land. Our very survival even to date depends heavily on what we extract from that land. In other words, our natural environment had and still has use value rather than an exchange value. Our back yard environment which is our land and sea is the super market and hardware store. Even right now, my big family house in the village is made from timber that came directly from our land. If we were to buy that timber, it could have cost us over a fifty thousand kina.

Any major agricultural activity or mining activity will definitely displace some people and cause people to lose land. Growing up in an area where Germans set up coconut plantations, I know that there was never any proper agreement for land owners to benefit in the long run. Some funny agreements were sign as companies capitalised on the people’s ignorance. Some land were even bought with tobacco sticks. Even now those plantation areas though neglected are subjects of legal conflict.

You just have to walk into the Oil Palm areas, to see hectares and hectares of land being turned into oil palm plantations. For expatriate workers, it means nothing to them as they have no concept of owning traditional land. But for a Papua New Guinean, it raises a lot of questions. The series of question that came to my mind was; who was displaced? Where are they now? How did they set up their communities after being displaced and are they getting regular income from their land. Apparently, they are no longer getting any income from the massive land given to oil palm companies back in the early days of Oil Palm development. That is a huge loss when you consider such real estate size in Europe if you were to lose it.

With the loss of land comes the loss of social structures that sustain communities. Displaced communities will have to fight for available land which in most cases is converted also into oil palm through the small holder scheme. This is gradually turning big communities into small nuclear families living by their blocks forced to live on a limited income from a two hectare block. The environment loses its use value and there is only one type of plant standing there that could pump out a certain amount of money and cannot be used for anything else. This creates a state of artificial scarcity as the social structures that once used to support families is eroding.

Certainly with no timber on the land to build your house, you will have to buy the timber. More often than not, the money generated from the blocks can only feed the family and nothing else. That is why, if you go to oil palm growing areas, the bulk of growers live in very small huts or houses that are substandard to what we expect. Driving around West New Britain, you will see women every afternoon carrying buckets and sauce pans looking for water. This was an unusal sight to me as where I come from almost every family if not , clan has a water tank.

Because of the growing population, erosion of social structures and dependency on limited income, food security is a problem. A food security project is being conducted at present to help growers to improve their food security after surveys show there is growing food security problems in the blocks. This is coming from an Industry that preaches to eradicate poverty. It is not uncommon to see school age children involved in harvesting and collecting lose fruits when they are suppose to be in school.

The real beneficeries appears to be the company and the company executive workers who live in luxurious conditions. What about those whose land these millions are being made. Even the land agreement used right now by the Oil Palm Industry Co-oporation has nothing in it for the land owners in the long run (at least at the time I read it, not so long ago).  Surely, communities are become spiders without webs in these areas. The spider will not eat the web but without the web, it does not survive as it was not meant to walk on the soil and catch its prey.