Call for ‘serious talks’

EAST New Britain needs to have serious talks on secondary downstream processing in the province, provincial administrator Wilson Matava says.
Matava said Prime Minister Peter O’Neill told the recent national leaders’ summit that by 2020, there should be no longer any export of round logs and raw primary products such as tuna and cash crops.
“This implies that all our primary products should be saved from further destruction and nurtured to be downstream-processed in the country and province,” he said.
“This policy direction is timely given our paradigm shift and should now prompt the provincial government and administration to start serious negotiations on downstream processing.”