Comment by Scott MacWilliam
There are currently two matters which draw media attention to politics in Papua New Guinea. The first is the revolt on Bougainville and the second the impending national election.
Central to both is the political struggle over the terms of land ownership. Regardless of the outcome of the revolt or the elections, the battle over land will remain primary in a country where over 80% of the population lives in rural areas.
This struggle seems likely to take on a new life in parts of the country outside the mining areas. While at first sight it will appear like a rerun of the battles for land redistribution which occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, the class content of the current struggle bears little resemblance to that of the earlier period.
No longer is the principal division between expatriate planters/settlers and international firms as the large land-holders, and indigenous landless squatters. Most large holdings in PNG now are owned by indigenous capitalists, so the struggle rarely can take the racial or ethnic forms which prevailed previously.
The first signs of the impending battle are starting to appear in the popular press. Indigenous business people who since independence had become substantial property owners in the North Solomons have begun to demand compensation for financial losses incurred from the continuing revolt in the province.
The losses are of short- and long-term concern to the entrepreneurs. Their accumulation often was underpinned by bank loans, and banks are demanding continuing repayments even though plantations and other enterprises are not operating. Failure to meet repayments will mean that legal ownership of large holdings, shops and businesses will pass to the banks. The government is being subjected to increasing pressure to rescue the indigenous capitalists, pressure to which it is particularly vulnerable in the midst of an election campaign.
Regardless of whether legal ownership of land and other commercial properties remains with the entrepreneurs or passes to the domestic and international banks, there is another, more important, battle looming than that between parts of the capitalist class. While this struggle is most advanced on Bougainville, there are continuing skirmishes in all the areas where there are large agricultural holdings.
The revolt which began around the mine in central Bougainville also drove plantation managers and labour off the copra and cocoa plantations in the north, south and east of the island. Without the continuous presence of managers, and the police who previously secured operations against crop theft and land claims from surrounding small-holders, another basis of ownership is being established. Households are spontaneously moving on to the plantations, subdividing the land and harvesting trees.
The longer it takes to reach a political settlement between the ary Army-provincial government and the national government, the more substantial the movement on to the former plantations will become.
Even a partial truce which opens ports and allows the agricultural companies to re-establish depots for export crops will improve the prospects of households which have laid claim to more land and trees. Once it is dried and fermented, there is no way of distinguishing between plantation and small-holder copra and cocoa, even if there was a military or police force sufficient to enforce such an assessment. Households can easily sell crops to the export firms, which have little reason to ask about the location of the trees on which the produce grew.
In other regions, the major international downturn is establishing preconditions for householders to move on to plantations. With coffee prices probably as low in real terms as in the 1930s depression, indebtedness in the coffee industry of the Highlands has been estimated at around 100 million kina (A$140 million).
Some plantations are being abandoned, and others operated on terms of essential maintenance only. Apart from having to meet interest bills estimated by one informant as equal to about 15% of output, many large-holding managements face stealing of up to 25% of the entire cherry crop. One recent assessment, for a major international firm which grows coffee and tea in the Western Highlands, put expenditure on security at K250,000 per annum. Indigenous owners are no less vulnerable to theft of crops, money and equipment.
By the late 1980s, small-holders already produced the bulk of PNG's coffee, cocoa and copra exports. This situation arose out of a major expansion of small-holder plantings which began in the 1950s and 1960s, and the stagnation of plantation output over the next two decades.
It remains to be seen whether the new push for land redistribution will result in an improvement in household living conditions, or will simply dissipate political opposition into a series of localised rural tussles which result in "more equality, more poverty". Once again, the principal political question to be faced is whether entrenching labour upon land represents an advance.