Invest in agriculture

EQUALITY is one of the pillars of the constitution of Papua New Guinea.
However, to a large extent, it is being undermined by the market.
The equality of income distribution is determined directly by the market.
Consequently, the amount of income you earn will determine your consumption.
However, the more open the market is, there is a risk for destructive competition to growing industries, which leads to high prices and the reduction of consumers will to consume adequately and save.
Consumption of food is a necessity.
Food production largely depends on the agricultural sector of a country. An agrarian society such as PNG consists mostly of agriculture.
Agriculture in PNG, however, has low marginal returns to scale due to underdevelopment of the sector.
Since the agriculture sector has low marginal returns to scale, the incentive to improve and produce by the producers would be easily curtailed by the uncontrollable competition in the market.
Agriculture in PNG is underdeveloped and could be easily undermined by outside competitors who have better capital.
The incentives of the local producers would then be directly influenced by the market to which their competitiveness would have atrophied because they cannot compete.
As a result, a continuous under-nourished population who earn income only affordable for a week’s amount of food due to high prices would continuously face challenges in living better lives.
This cycle of poverty will continue to grow unless the agriculture sector is provided with sufficient resources to fund its development and protection from the market forces which will not only effectively liberate people from poverty and diseases, but will go in a long way to organise communities into better functioning communities.
Until then, we cannot continue to allow the market to destroy the developing agricultural industry in PNG.
Due to this, the agriculture sector should be protected and subsidised so that it becomes competitive and produce good, affordable and healthy products.

Calvin