Up the Fly without a paddle

JO CHANDLER | The Global Mail

KABUSI KEBEI’S DEATHBED IS A GRASS MAT, her pillow a knot of rags. She rises from it with a quiet greeting, showing more grace than a stranger’s rude intrusion on her dying deserves.

She endures my few questions, but plainly Kebei just wants to lie back down by the embers of her fire, even though all those around her are sweltering in the steamy build-up to the wet season.

She is in pain and I, ashamed, retreat. She will never know that she’s been cast as a bit player in the latest chapter of an epic narrative of power, politics, money, hope, expectation and exploitation — miscast, as it turns out.

And yet hers is likely the truest tale to be found on this murky stretch of Papua New Guinea’s fabled Fly River.

I’ve been led to Kebei by a posse of her neighbours, villagers living on the palm-fringed bank of the Fly delta. They identify the mother of eight as a possible casualty of a strange new plague rumoured to be striking their remote communities; one said to cause women to bleed, sores to weep and strange lumps to grow.

They suspect it may have been brewed in the brown water of their infamously despoiled river, the gutter for 30 years of operations of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine, 1,000 kilometres upstream.

Each year the mine — the mother lode for the PNG economy, accounting for 16 per cent of gross domestic product in 2011 — dumps 40 to 50 million tonnes of waste rock and tailings in the Ok Tedi tributary which flows into the Fly River (down from a peak of 90 million in 2002). Porgera gold mine also sends much of its waste down this waterway.

The story of a mysterious disease outbreak in the remote South Fly, where many communities can only be reached by boat or air, has been making headlines in the PNG press.

It has also prompted questions in the Parliament — including calls from three Fly River MPs to close the mine on health and environmental grounds — and is now creeping into the international media.

The issue follows a leaked, six-month-old internal report by Ok Tedi’s development arm, scoping out concerns raised by women community leaders. The company referred the report — which urged immediate dispatch of an expert health team to investigate further — to its health agency, but no other action was taken.

The leaked report surfaces at the same time as Ok Tedi Mining Limited (OTML) is negotiating compensation deals with 100,000 Fly River people living downstream of its operations.

The company has plans to wring another decade of life from its mine, which had been due to close in 2014. At a recent mining conference in Sydney, OTML announced the deal was all but sealed, with most communities already signed – the community of the Manawete region, which I visit, is one of two holding back.

Meanwhile, upstream in the political headwaters, there’s a mighty struggle for control of the $1.4 billion fund Ok Tedi spawned for the PNG nation, the Sustainable Development Program (PNGSDP).

In a unique arrangement, a battered BHP divested its 52 per cent stake in the mine to the people of PNG via the Singapore-registered SDP in 2002. This came after BHP conceded the mine’s environmental fallout was much worse than it had anticipated, costing it dearly in reputation and out-of-court settlements to afflicted Fly communities.

With the government of PNG deciding to keep the mine running, the deal indemnified BHP against future legal liabilities. Two-thirds of SDP’s money is locked away for long-term development after the mine closes.

Today the fund’s value has exploded beyond all expectations, courtesy of the resources boom. If the Ok Tedi mine — as of last year wholly owned by the people of PNG — continues to operate until 2022 as now planned, the value of the program’s long-term projects will swell to $3.7 billion, according to a recent independent report on SDP.

In the meantime, SDP rolls out an ambitious development program worth more than $100 million in 2011, making it a heavyweight aid agency equivalent to some of the nation’s biggest external donors.

In a landscape of desperate need, cashed-up SDP is a potent resource, and some of PNG’s political big men are increasingly resentful of external influence over the fund, particularly BHP’s lingering veto over the shape of the board.

These tensions spilled into a pronouncement by PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill last month that prominent Australian economist and longtime PNG mining player Professor Ross Garnaut — chairman of Ok Tedi Mining, and until recently also chair of SDP — was no longer welcome in PNG.

Garnaut had reportedly said, on the subject of the stockpiling wealth, that it was “tempting for political figures to think of better ways of using it right now, rather than putting it into long-term development”. O’Neill blasted this as a slur on his nation’s reputation.

Acutely aware that the vortex of politics and money swirling around Ok Tedi is as treacherous and turbid as the notorious Fly tides, I nevertheless take a plane from Port Moresby and then — at the invitation of the Ok Tedi Mine Impacted Area Association, a community group which has been agitating on health concerns — a fast dinghy from Daru, and wade in to see something of the realities of life in the South Fly.

This is the opening section of a beautifully written feature article on the problems besetting Papua New Guinea’s most impoverished province. You can read Jo Chandler’s complete story here

Comments

[Arthur Williams / Cardiff]

Just wonder if some of the large number of drums of cyanide that fell off a ship in the early days of the Ok Tedi mine have corroded and the leaking dangerous chemical is now effecting the river and or its fish.

Could this be causing these apparently unexplained health problems?

[Martyn Namorong]

I agree with David's sentiments.

I guess the obvious question that arises for all Papua New Guineans to reflect on is;

"at whose expense do you enjoy some of the benefits of modern society and government?"

[Jo Chandler]

Thanks Keith for sharing this with your wide audience, and thank you to the commentariate here for your kind words. Even 5000 words shortchanges the complexity if the issues. We're very lucky to have an enterprise like the Global Mail emerge in these precarious days for media to support and host this kind of longer-haul, away-from-the-spotlight journalism.

[David Kitchnoge]

The neglect of Western Province has haunted my conscience ever since I visited Kiunga and the lower Middle Fly region in 2004.

I cried when I visited then and I still do when I think about them.

I cried because I couldn't fathom the mismatch in how much they give to the rest of us and how much we give back to them in return.

They have vast land, an abundance of other resources and a ready made highway in the Fly River system that they can use to improve their lot.

Do they choose to live in such miserable conditions or have they been neglected by someone?

Have they received proper guidance and assistance over the years to try and better their own lives? If not, then why not?

[Mrs Barbara Short]

Yes, thanks for the article.

I read it to the end and felt very sorry for the people of the Fly River region.

The Western Province will need a lot of help with their efforts to rebuild the Aid Posts and train the nurses that work in them.

It is such a vast sparsely settled area one wonders if re-settlement schemes, with a sound agricultural basis and with good public services, would be the way to go.

[Kevin O'Regan]

Superb article Jo and very sobering reading.

Please endeavour to get it out to the multitudes via Weekend Magazine in Post-Courier and The National and TV.

I hope Senator Bob Carr and Richard Marles are reading Attitude this morning.

[Peter Kranz]

As can be expected from Jo this article is superb - well researched, profoundly moving and very salient.

I encourage you to read the full version. It covers a wide swathe of what major ills befall PNG society and threats to the future of PNG's younger generation.

The resistant TB epidemic is truly frightening in its consequences for PNG and Australia. The SDP could provide the resources to respond effectively, but too much seems to disappear once it gets into Moresby bank accounts.

This article should be required reading for all PNG and Australian politicians and senior civil servants.