Papua New Guinea is considered one of the fastest-growing
economies in the world, but the boons of this progress are largely concentrated
in the hands of government officials and private investors with little left for
the masses of the country, which is today ranked 157th out of 187 countries in
terms of human development. As the country surrenders its natural bounty to
international investors – PNG has attracted the highest levels of direct
foreign investment in the region, averaging more than 100 million U.S. dollars
per year since 1970 – its people seem to get poorer and sicker. 2.8 million
people live below the poverty line, where maternal mortality is 711 deaths per
100,000 live births, literacy is just 63 percent and only 19 percent of people
have access to sanitation. In Eight Mile Settlement, located on the outskirts
of Port Moresby, 15,000 residents drink contaminated water from broken taps.
Water-borne diseases are the leading cause of hospital deaths in Papua New
Guinea. In Pomio, one of the least developed districts in East New Britain – an
island province off the northeast coast of the Papua New Guinean mainland - there
is a lack of health services, decent roads, water and sanitation. Life expectancy
here is a miserable 45-50 years and the infant mortality rate of 61 per 1,000
live births is significantly higher than the national rate of 47.
According to the National Research Institute, PNG has less
than one doctor and 5.3 nurses per 10,000 people. The availability of basic
drugs in health clinics has fallen by 10 percent and visits from doctors
dropped by 42 percent in the past decade. Despite rapid population growth, the
number of patients seeking medical help per day has decreased by 19 percent. Millions
of dollars that could be used to develop crucial health infrastructure is lost
to corruption. Papua New Guinea has been given a corruption score of 25/100 –
where 100 indicates clean governance – in comparison to the world average of
43/100, by Transparency International.
Land grabbing has led to the loss of 5.5 million hectares –
or 12 percent of the country’s land area – to foreign investors, many of which
are engaged in logging, rather than agricultural projects of benefit to local
communities.
Papua New Guinea, home to the world’s third largest tropical
rainforest, has a forest cover of an estimated 29 million hectares, but the
rapid growth of its export-driven economy has made it the second largest
exporter of tropical timber after Malaysia. The California-based Oakland
Institute estimates that PNG exports approximately three million cubic metres
of logs every year, primarily to China. The United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO) predicts that 83 percent of the country’s commercially
viable forests will be lost or degraded by 2021 due to commercial logging,
mining and land clearance for oil palm plantations.
“Within ten years nearly all accessible forests will be
logged out and at the root of this problem is endemic and systematic
corruption,” a spokesperson for Act Now PNG told IPS last December.
This could spell disaster for the roughly 85 percent of
Papua New Guinea’s population who live in rural areas, and are reliant on
forests for their survival.
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