Regional

Papua New Guinea's food bowl is empty

Saturday 13 February 2016 | Published in Regional

KANMA – Old Kaupa Bani walks with a tall cane fashioned from a black palm outside his hut in Kanma village. Blind, burdened by joint pains, too weak to work his garden, and with no children to look after him, he has been helped by extended family. But as a devastating drought hits Papua New Guinea with force few rural villages were prepared for, the flow of kindness has turned into scraps in the last nine months. Some days Bani eats nothing. “I have to be fed to get strength,” Bani tells an interpreter. “But since the drought, there’s been insufficient food, so I’ve grown very weak. Across the road from the home Bani rarely has the strength to leave, Anna Snaka peels a handful of weevil-ridden sweet potatoes. She adds ferns to this meagre meal she’ll feed her three children, and a barely edible yam scavenged from the bush. Until nine months ago a typical meal would have included fat, sweet potatoes, garden greens, and sometimes fish, corned beef, or chicken, and then pig or goat with taro and cassava on special occasions. Snaka says she has tried planting more food, but the soil is still too hot. She had four pigs, but two have died from lack of food. She bursts into tears as she holds up the bitter yam that she and others in her village must eat out of desperation. She’ll boil it twice and add salt so her children can stomach it. The Papua New Guinean National Disaster Centre estimates the severe El Niño-driven drought currently affects two million people in this large Pacific island nation. In a population of 7.3 million, 87 per cent live outside urban centres; most are subsistence farmers. The Highlands region is normally called the “food bowl” of the nation, so when drought strikes in the Highlands, the effects ripple throughout the economy. Food prices skyrocket, large-scale migration occurs as people search for work or short-term cash, and city workers send money to villages so families can buy food to survive. But the people in Kanma village in Chuave district have few such connections to the modern economy. Anna Snaka has two older children in the Highland hub of Goroka, where they have their own struggles surviving and are unable to send money to help her. Unlike villagers further east, who received 20-kilogramME sacks of rice in government aid, Kanma villagers say they have received no relief. By their own accounts, they are starving. Matthew Kanua, an agronomist and soil scientist, worked through the 1997 drought and now coordinates the response for PNG’s churches. Having assessed the evidence provided by a Fairfax news team, he says Kanma village is slipping from Category 3 to Category 4 in drought assessment terms– that means no food in gardens, only famine food (ferns, unripe bananas, bitter yams) being eaten. Chuave district lies in the central highlands province of Simbu in Papua New Guinea, just 435 kilometres north-west of the busy capital Port Moresby. This rugged, mountainous terrain produces coffee which attracts a premium. Yet the rural road remains a barrier for many in getting their beans to market and joining the cash economy in earnest. There are times, according to local farmer Max Soa, when the road is so wet and impassable that they put their coffee bags on the back of the car and carry the car along Gun-Beroma Road to the nearest junction. The road that becomes Gun-Beroma runs atop a ridge among a handful of narrow ranges that stretch finger-like out of the western slopes of Mount Elimbari. Heartbreaking stories of the drought pervade this 32-kilometre stretch, nowhere more than in Kanma, where the limestone-and-dirt track dips 500 metres before coming to a halt just as the valley tips sharply down to the Wagi river.

Regional

Territory confirms Zika cases

Saturday 13 February 2016 | Published in Regional

PAGO PAGO – American Samoa’s Lieutenant Governor, Lemanu Peleti Mauga, says the territory now has confirmed cases of the Zika virus and has issued an alert.

Regional

Doctors refuse to release baby

Saturday 13 February 2016 | Published in Regional

BRISBANE – Doctors at a Brisbane hospital have refused to release a one-year-old girl, badly burnt on Nauru, until a “suitable home environment is identified”.

Regional