Highland farmers of PNG to keep traditional crops

05 December 2006
When Seedsavers Australia travels to traditional/tribal farmers it is never with the intention of teaching them better ways to feed themselves or to save seeds.

Michel with tribal leaders in Tari, Papua New Guinea, the Huli capital with 800 habitants.

Huli tribal farmers of the Southern Highlands of New Guinea must be amongst the most skilled farmers in the world. They are up there with the Andean, Ethiopian and Himalayan farmers. In the highlands, the Hulis formed terraces that the women maintain with extremely hard work, they use compost, let the land rest a while and have produced high yields for thousands of years that way. They started their farming system at least 7000 years ago.

Instead of lecturing we experience their ways of farming first and we collaborate on seed issues (political, globalisation, patents, IPR issues, access to institutionalised seeds from Genbanks) and only visit projects on express request of NGO's, not at the cost of the indigenous NGO. In fact often we visit projects that we have been allocating/redirecting grants to. Theses are most often grants that come from members of the public or from our kitty. We do not see ourselves as the seed missionaries that push good seeds to unsuspecting tribals. We can trouble shoot and help with procedures to check the quality of the seed they produce. We make sure that local varieties of vegetables are not replaced by imported chemically dependant seeds through local seed system of multiplication and distribution. And we don’t bring seed back to Australia nor take seeds away from Australia. There are international laws protecting intellectual property related to plant heritage.

Keeping traditional crops

In September I visited a very active NGO based in Tari southern highlands PNG. That is Community Based Health Care (CBHC). I encouraged the ngo staff and trainers to re-value their traditional native crops grown by cutting or tuber and to save seed of crop varieties that are adapted to their food habits and growing conditions.

This follows on the work of John Vail, an Australian who joined a Huli clan some thirty years ago and married a local woman. He introduced many clan level initiatives, such as a household water catchment and storage, new leguminous crops, mixed cropping and small livestock farming systems for extra protein and to improve soils and of course seed saving, producing quality seeds at the home level and network the seed in their clans and communities by banking on the best farmers to get the ball rolling or the seed. We ourselves encourage the inventory of their local crops like bananas, yams, taro etc. 120 varieties of bananas were inventoried in Makira Solomon island last year and 850 varieites of taros. That is in the Solomon islands. We are looking for funds to continue in PNG.

If they are such fabulous farmers why is it then that young children and women are now showing signs of malnutrition? An explosion in population to 300 000 has led to lowered yields from not enough land to go around. The soils are becoming depleted and eroded from overuse. That is all too well documented. Too wet weather is rotting their staple sweet potatoes. Even a two day flooding spoils the sweet potatoes. In a place where sweet potato ( kauakau) are the staple for people and the pigs are fed exclusively with sweet pototoes. They even scrub them for them.

There are disturbing facts about women. In the little use ngo library in Tari, I found a report on women suicide rate. it was a graph done by WHO showing a rate of 30 times higher for women between the age of 17 to 24, levelling at 50 between the sexes. total year of exposure nearly 200 000 years for each sex.

Additionally programmes to stimulate rural enterprises have introduced cash crops such as imported hybrid cabbage seeds and coffee. Such novelty mono-cropping has resulted in an increase in insecticide-use on top of the need to purchase seed every year. The cost of seeds and insecticides eats up most of the profit I was told by everyone who is on the treadmill, an identical experience to many tropical highland areas around the world. Hulis habitually eat large quantities of cooked greens, wild and cultivated, every day and that is extremely nutritious. Wedges of hybrid cabbage are a high-status luxury item with a brisk trade at the market but cannot and should not replace their wildfood and cultivated traditional greens.

Re-diversifying their crops is a way to food security without external expertise. We help them stock take their crops for their own use.

We can only fall in love with the very lively tribal Hulis whose ecological foot print is so incredibly minute. They feed themselves (apart from their Coca Cola and Maggy noodle enfauation), don’t have cars or roads to speak of (no thanks to central PNG governement), don’t have rubbish tips as they reuse everything, (I open a tin of tuna to share and was politely asked for the empty tin). They survive without a doctor (no doc in the last ten years at their only hospital always running out of antibiotics and codein type painkillers).

The hospital is staffed with very capable nurses looking after external aid patients, nursing mothers, emergencies, pneumonia cases and malaria cases. The electricity is on when the generator is on a few hours a day. I was asked for antibiotics for pneumonia by the staff. I said I will see what I can get as it is not my expertise. One nurse said it breaks her heart to have people walking while sick to the hospital for several hours or more or pay for the bus which is expensive, and send back the people untreated.
They produce the best coffee in the world for international market but never have tasted it themselves. No-one I met had ever roasted their own coffee.

The Hulis sell their dry unroasted coffee locally for one Australian dollar a kg or less for a hand grown, hand harvested, mouth crushed product. They throw the red berries in their mouths and spit the beans on one side and the cherry on to the other to extract the coffee bean out of the cherry. I am told all women doing that get malaria...it may be because of excess sugar they are absorbing? Could your readers and friends research that one? It does take 8kg of PNG dry organic mouth shelled coffee to pay for a medium size tin of Nescafe.

In our 21 years of activities, seedsavers has always been supported in its action.

Christopher Dean founder of Thursday Plantations and chairman of TP Health has given us tea trees for years with a friend producing the good stuff so I gave quite a few bottles away to nuses and little bush clinics that CBHC has created in the clan themselves.

This time Christopher and friend Craig Chapman have offered to send 20 kg of oil with bottles to refill to the hospital and CBHC. The hospital also requested a mop and a bucket to clean up the floor...true.

Let us know if you have some donations. Transport is very expensive in PNG. The only way to reach Tari is by air.

Everyday drama would happen but everyone would remain calm. One day it was a young guy arriving with a bamboo arrow stuck between his left eye and nose. He passed in and out shivering on a stetcher. A tribal war where someone got hurt
Another day, we had a woman with a broken umbilical cord stuck inside her. She was evactuated days after by the worst road to a hospital with surgeon, 8 hours away. She returned the same day as the road was cut, caused by a landslide.

Hulis do avoid killing in clashes because of the compensation they have to pay to the clan or suffer a worse war on their hands for years to come. Wars happen about land, pigs, and women.

Pig is legal tender and replaces money in bride price or in any compensation case as there is rarely enough cash generated by a clan. 50 full grown pigs at 500 australian a pig is more than a year taking for a subsistence farmer. School fees are paid in pigs so most kids are taken out of schools early.

When having a café latte, spare a thought for the Huli women. The Huli were "discovered" in 1930's.