By BIBIAN BARRENG
A SUGGESTION was put forward to participants at the PNG Chambers of Mining and Petroleum seminar in Port Moresby yesterday for all community affairs managers to hold a forum addressing landowner issues with consistency.
Sandy Talita, New Guinea Energy manager community relations and logistic, summed up issues regarding landowners when he delivered his presentation on law and negotiations.
He said: “The art of negotiation was becoming a syndrome than an effective bargaining tool”.
“Million-dollar resource projects were being constructed across country with MoA (memorandum of agreement) signed between stakeholders which sometimes are highly questionable,” Mr Talita said.
He highlighted that the quest for understanding the complexity of landowner issues and move resource projects forward have opened up new dimensions in the manner in which negotiations were being handled.
“It is high time the Government and industry rise to its challenges, face realty and take the situation head on.”
“We need to decide if we can continue to ‘negotiate’ and build million-dollar investment projects or take a new approach and consider legislative changes to address this phenomena,” Mr Talita said.
He said the investors should not continue investing millions of dollars on projects built on MoA but rather some form of standardised system should be set to ensure smooth transitions from exploration to production, to expansion, or project closure.
Oil Search community affairs manager Willie Kupo called on the Government to step in and provide resource remote areas where resource companies had gone and built schools, aid posts, road, and many more.
“Under-resourcing of social services is another problem … we can build schools, aid posts, roads, bridges … no problem, but it’s the Government which has the responsibility to provide the teachers, the health workers and continuously paid their salaries to be out there,” Mr Kupo said.
He said another security-risk area is where landowners could stop an export pump which produces some 50,000 barrels of oil per day, the cost of which would amount to K4 million to K5 million.
“From the petroleum project, the Government makes something like K3.4 million a day and that would mean that one would see it as an urgency to get out there and deal with the issue and resolve the problem, or you start losing K3.4 million,” Mr Kupo pointed out.
He suggested that the best way to address the problems was to prevent them from occurring in the first place and as such stakeholders should be proactive rather than reactive.