Address rural poverty with tailored policies

RURAL poverty in Papua New Guinea is a complex phenomenon, which includes low income, unequal access to means of production, to health and education facilities, food insecurity and low nutrition status, natural resource degradation and low empowerment.
Strategies for rural poverty reduction in Papua News must simultaneously address a multitude of problems to be effective and must be tailored to the geographical and cultural situation as well as an evolving external context.
Rural PNG issues are numerous: conflicts over land tenure, non-access to natural resources, non-accessibility to markets and lack of government services.
There is a need to address rural development concerns in a more systematic and comprehensive manner because rural development is the key to forging links between economic, social and environmental development progress.
Rural communities are of critical importance in the struggle to achieve sustainable development, yet they tend to be neglected in the development strategies of both the government and donors.
Infant and maternal mortality in rural communities is very high but go unreported or their statistics are integrated with those of urban or well-off communities.
It has become clear that there are close links between rural poverty and environmental degradation, and that the underlying problems must be tackled in an integrated way by protecting and expanding the environment and natural resources on which the rural people depend.
The stability and predictability of rural people’s lives is severely diminished as they lose control over the use of their land, food, environment – indeed their livelihood.
Alois Balar