My father’s father lived in a complete agrarian society. What that means is that everything they ate they grew, everything they needed they made, all labour and life revolved around the harvest, and ceremonies celebrating the harvest. You know the kind of stuff you envision in pagan ceremonies celebrating mother nature. For my people, this happened up until the mid 21st century in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and fragments of these practices still happens today.
My father was educated under the Western education system by the colonial Australian Government where assimilation into the industrious and materialistic West was the order of the day. The agrarian society once prized was frowned upon as uncivilized and backward. My father so indoctrinated in this idea of the western way of life refused for his children to teach his mother tongue which was a direct act of rebellion since in my country with 800 distinct languages it is ones identity. My father spent much of his life in an inward fight of whether or not to keep which side .Initially he wanted to assimilate the ways of the white man but mellowed with time grasping at every opportunity to celebrate and preserve his fathers culture.
By the time I had reached adulthood, there were remnants of my rich culture left. My people as are other indigenous people of the world are connected to the land through generations of a sacred relationship of mutual respect and reverence.So much so that the first actual agrarian , dating to 10,000years BC from the Kuk Village in the Waghi Valley in Jiwaka Province no more than 300 km away from my village.
Our ties to the land makes it difficult for it to be developed commercially, Infact, 97 % of the land in Papua New Guinea is classified as traditional land and the remaining 3% to the Church, Government and private respectively.
When my father went for higher education, true to his lineage he pursued Agriculture. At the time of the late 60’s and early 70’s, PNG was on the steps of independence, there was an air of confidence they could smell in self determination and nationalism not sensed before, the anglo expatriate population slowly evaporated overseas as questions raised about what sort of future a largely indigenious government would provide, considering by then most of the country had made less than 40 years of contact with the outside world especially the highlands Yet for a lot of the upcoming middle class bourgeoisie in the public service this was a time where they could determine their own fate .My father believed that agriculture was the way out of what the colonisers termed our way of life of that being in poverty.The fact that we didn’t have Tupperware or TV let alone clothes on our backs but were able to lead self sustaining lives on our own terms was disconcerting to the colonialists saviour complex.
To the colonial governments credit was its emphasis on agriculture , introduction of commodities to usher in this new dawn. Young men like my father working in Department of Agriculture travelled the length and breadth of their province creating crop awareness through extension services, building nurseries and helping buyers reach rural places to provide market for the produce. Whilst the Dept of Civil works built roads to accessible places whilst airfreight to more remote places where put in place to help farmers sell their produce . This worked for a moment and farmers prospered, they could afford health, education as well as clothes and processed food. However, much of the infrastructure of production supply was owned by colonialist interests and colonial interests could go only as far when it came to aligning indigenous interest who were the labour to the plantation and production of crop.
At the height of the vibrant commodities in the 70s-80s Papua New Guinea produced excellent coffee and honey. In the 90’s-00’s local vanilla was at its peak quality and more recently cocoa. It seems that when farmers focus on quality we produce the best, our commodities are renowned for their distinct flavour and are organically grown fetching top dollar in niche markets, however the government didn’t reward this with more funding and incentives which promoted the smallholder farmers who were responsible for bulk production. The in equability and bottle neck that resulted from farmers receiving minimum prices for top dollar produce later resulted in karma as farmers production too dropped. For instance the annual coffee production in 1977 was about one million bags of coffee since then the coffee production has not passed this, 44 years after production is just above 700,000 bags. Of course there are multi-factorial issues affecting this but the obvious one was inequity of prices for laborious crops.
The government had failed to capitalise on national strength: agriculture. It had failed to vigilantly maintain, expand and innovate the commodity industry as it turned its focus more on the mushrooming extractive industry and aid money. In the process inadvertently alienating the majority of its labour force as more than 85 % lived in rural communities who still to this day do not pay personal income tax.
A lasting legacy of the colonial administration was the ownership of infrastructure and production facilities by people or families associated with the colonial administration. Most of Indigenious players are large scale farmers and middle traders involved in partnerships with established houses. Although there are a few indigenious owned businesses , these are still minor players eventhough they identify more with farmer issues and have more active social programs with their farmers and the communities. Industry has always had white faces.
I grew up picking coffee beans to pay for stationery as a child for .30t-0.50t (less than 10 cents) for a 10kg bucket, working as a administration assistant on semester breaks at a coffee house to pay for university tuition, my father in his own humble way a coffee man was actively involved in the coffee industry from farm to export. All the while, under his shadow, I was being exposed to the commodities industry, its potential and promise as well as its inequalities, ineffectiveness and inefficiencies as my interest aligned into working with smallholder.
The more I became involved the greater the desire to help farmers find and establish markets where their produce would be appreciated and the need for the disparities in the markets addressed. Initially I bought vegetables and fruits from rural women to sell to urban markets but then I realised that they were spending more of their labour and time on commodities that were earning low prices and that’s when I got involved in coffee. It had been the elephant in the room, that I never wanted to address eventhough I knew so much about this industry and naturally this trickled to other commodities like vanilla and cocoa.
I don’t work with people with large tracts of land (although that is a myth in my country) but with smallholder plot farmers of coffee across rural Papua New Guinea to address and improve the quality of coffee production with the aim of finding niche markets for them to sell their coffee but at a more equitable price.
My purpose here on Substack is to give a voice and a greater appreciation to my journey as an indigenious woman operating a social enterprise in Papua New Guinea and the challenges and triumphs I face along the way to bringing quality specialty coffee and other commodities to the international niche markets.