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Globalisation and junk products
THE Adventist Book Centre in Madang
sells CDs of Heritage Singers and other international gospel artists at
prices ranging from K50 to over K120.
Certain shops in Madang town, on the other hand, sell similar CDs at
anywhere between K9 and K18.
What’s the difference, you ask? The latter are pirated junk or stuff easily
mass produced in the backyard using the readily available information and
communication technology (ICT). The former are genuine products from
original manufacturers or authorised dealers.
Certain shops are selling the pirated cheap junk with impunity. No one in
authority cares about the rubbish this band of ‘investors’ are dumping on
the innocent public in Madang, and almost everywhere else in PNG.
As a well-read person, you are frustrated at in the manner in which this
group of ‘investors’ get way with such impunity and make their big bucks
from a public that is increasingly having little or no say over what is
being dumped on its doorsteps.
The criminality described above is repeated in just about every other
product and brand in every little junk shop mushrooming across the Papua New
Guinean landscape.
From every place I have been to in recent years – from remote Karkar Island
to faraway Tari – the junk shops with their hawk-eyed owners are spreading
to the far flung corners of the country like a cancer.
Make no mistake, investors are welcome in our country, they are needed; our
successive governments vouch for this year in, year out. But when they do
not follow rules and simply think Papua New Guineans are, to use a colonial
terminology, bush kanakas and sell rubbish to us and think we have no right
to protest or demand for quality goods and services, then we must stand up
and make our feelings known?
When these investors or perhaps latter day colonisers treat Papua New
Guineans with contempt, is it any wonder that a minister of State should
bring up the subject in Parliament?
Minister of State assisting the Prime Minister Philemon Embel, according to
press reports, complained about the influx of junk goods from Asia in
Parliament last week.
Mr Embel is reported to have stated that the influx of the cheap and low
quality goods from Asia was the result of the Look North Policy of the PNG
government in the early 1990s and the policy had to be reviewed.
The Look North Policy was the pet project of the People’s Democratic
Movement (PDM) government of which Mr Embel was a senior member.
The Look North Policy was among a series of major policy and legislative
changes in the 1990s.
Notable among them were the introduction of the “user-pay policy” on the
main social services such health and education, the dismantling of the laws
that reserved certain businesses for Papua New Guineans and the enactment of
the Internal Security Act (ISA).
Among other consequences, the ISA now requires citizens to seek seven days
clearance from the police commissioner to stage protests or public rallies.
When the PDM lost government to People’s Progress Party (PPP) leader Sir
Julius Chan in a successful no-confidence vote in 1995, Sir Julius took the
reigns and pronounced a modified policy saying PNG is “Looking North and
walking the Pacific”.
The Look North Policy was perhaps, on the hindsight, an inevitable offshoot
of globalisation – nations had to break down barriers and restrictions and
open up their economies.
Missionaries of globalisation preach the gospel of benefits it brings to
multitudes with the breaking down of traditional barriers. Countries and
peoples are told to compete and seize the opportunities provided by
globalisation.
Globalisation is a race that is not for the meek and poor. The powerless
find themselves left behind or trampled over by the powerful and
resourceful.
It may be a big ask to expect a poorly resourced government of a struggling
developing country like PNG to enforce its laws and policies against the
side-effects of globalisation such as the influx of pirated CDs in Madang
and the influx of cheap and poor quality goods from Asia as lamented by
Minister Embel.
As Asian food prices bite, analysts
warn of worse to come
By Sunil Jagtiani
HONG KONG: Rising food prices have hit Asia’s poor so hard that many have
taken to the streets in protest, but experts see few signs of respite from
the growing problem.
An array of factors, from rising food demand and high oil prices to global
warming, could make high costs for essentials such as rice, wheat and milk a
permanent fixture, they say.
“The indications are in general pointing to high prices,” Abdolreza
Abbassian, a senior grains analyst at the UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation in Rome, told AFP.
The agency’s figures show food prices globally soared nearly 40% last year,
helping stoke protests in Myanmar, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Yet Asian economic growth is a key reason why prices rose, Joachim von
Braun, from the International Food Policy Research Institute, said.
“High growth in per capita income, especially in Asia, is driving demand for
food,” von Braun, the Washington-based group’s director general, said.
At the same time, Asia’s growth has left many of its poor behind, he added.
They spend between 50 and 70% of their meagre incomes on food, making price
rises especially debilitating.
“There was also a lack of investment in agriculture, particularly in science
and technology and in irrigation,” von Braun said.
Apart from overall higher food demand, changes in taste favouring meat are
said to be pushing up prices, since farmed animals feed heavily on grain.
Drought and bad weather, high oil prices stoking transport costs, spiking
biofuel demand and low reserves have also played their part, experts say.
“In Australia, we lost almost a year of wheat due to drought,” Katie Dean,
an economist at ANZ Bank in Sydney, said.
Cold weather caused grain crops to fail in Europe and the United States,
while bird flu culls and disease outbreaks hit Asian poultry and meat
supply, she added, citing as an example pig diseases in China.
Elsewhere, Bangladesh is struggling to feed its poor after a cyclone
destroyed $US600 million worth of its rice crop last year.
The price of rice rose around 70% in Bangladesh last year. It now stands at
around US$0.50 per kilo, but many Bangladeshis live on less than a dollar
per day.
More recently, unexpected snowstorms swept across rice growing areas in
China, where rising food costs have already raised the fear of unrest.
Experts are still wary of pinning the blame for these events explicitly on
the impact of global warming.
But a Stanford University study found that climate change could cut South
Asian millet, maize and rice production by 10% or more by 2030.
Climate change, in particular the drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions from
conventional fuels to curb global warming, has also driven demand for
biofuels.
The high cost of crude oil, which hit record levels in January, has made
biofuel production more commercially viable.
Farmers are switching to growing crops such as corn or jatropha, a weed, to
feed the biofuel industry rather than crops destined for the dinner table.
“Ambitious government biofuel targets are leading to pressure on prices and
probably to some sort of structural increase overall in trend food prices,”
Dean said.
Thailand, for instance, now requires that all its diesel fuel includes a
component made from palm oil, which is also used for cooking. However, the
new regulation has sent palm oil prices soaring, contributing to shortages
amid shrinking supplies.
The UN food agency’s figures show the amount of US maize used for biofuel
has doubled since 2003, and predict European wheat use for ethanol could
rise 12-fold by 2016.
Such trends have led worried Asian governments to address the rise in food
prices following popular unrest.
Indonesia has cut tariffs on soybean imports, a staple food it gets mostly
from the United States, and wants to curb its reliance on imports.
Malaysia is to establish a national food stockpile. It recently arrested
dozens of activists protesting food price rises.
Vietnam said it would suspend rice exports, and India did so last year,
Duncan Macintosh, Manila-based development director for the International
Rice Research Institute, said.
But while economists expect food supplies to rise somewhat in response to
higher prices, Macintosh said others doubted it was that easy.
“Myanmar could increase rice production, Indonesia’s got a bit of spare
land, but there isn’t some huge new area that could kick in quickly,” he
said.
Urbanisation and industrialisation in Asia were eliminating farmland and
soaking up scarce water resources, he added.
Meanwhile, government policies were trying to push people out of subsistence
agricultural lives into the industrial sector and urban jobs.
“The key is to increase the productivity per hectare right across Asia,” he
said. “But that is a very long-term fix.”
The prospect of high food prices is a sharp break from the past, when the
Green Revolution pushed up output but drove down prices in Asia from the
late 1960s.
Financial speculators have even begun betting the price of items like wheat
and rice will rise, making the picture still more volatile.
“Even if prices fall,” cautioned Abbassian, “the chances they will come down
substantially are perhaps not there.”– AFP
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