Planning for agricultural development and sustainable land management in Papua New Guinea

• Department of Agriculture and Livestock, Papua New Guinea
• National Agricultural Research Institute, Papua New Guinea

The actions of smallholder farmers will be critical in ensuring the economic and environmental wellbeing of Papua New Guinea (PNG), a country whose population of has doubled in the last 30 years and continues to increase rapidly. More than three-quarters of the population (about 3 million people) are smallholder semi-subsistence farmers, and more than 60 per cent of these people live in hilly areas. They produce most of their own food, mainly using shifting cultivation systems, as well as growing significant amounts of domestically-marketed fresh vegetables.

Smallholders have the potential to stimulate local development through their demand for, and supply of, goods and services with a high local content. Their savings and investments will also be important in national economic growth. As the non-agricultural economy cannot provide full employment to more than about 15 per cent of the working-age population, agriculture is the only sector with the potential to increase employment to keep up with population growth.

The challenge is to manage the intensification and growth of agriculture in the smallholder sector by increasing diversity and using local resources to best effect. To do this, high quality information about the ecological bases of PNG farming, and about the farming systems and farmers themselves, is needed. As well as a lack of knowledge, there was also a lack of any practical method to acquire such knowledge regularly. This exercise was well overdue because the last attempt at the national level to collect systematic information about farming systems was in 1962.

An earlier ACIAR project, ANRE 196/044, commenced the task of collecting this information. A review recommended that its work be extended, and this project was the result.

The main aim of the project was to collect information on natural resources and farming systems (especially smallholder agriculture) in PNG, with the ultimate objective of addressing problems of land degradation and underdevelopment.
An important additional aim was to strengthen the ability of the PNG National Agricultural Research Institution (NARI) to develop strategies in the future for the planned intensification of its agriculture without associated land degradation.

Apart from visits to PNG for data collection, the work was carried out mainly in Australia, with two PNG scientists seconded there for part of the time. From the earlier research the project team further refined definition of the agro-ecological zones (AEZ) within PNG on the basis of ecological conditions suitable for agriculture. The team then identified, categorised and located the different farming systems used in PNG within AEZs.

The next step of the project was to develop ways of identifying at a national scale 'at risk' farming systems, using information already available in PNG databases (e.g. PNG Resource Information System - PNGRIS). Essentially, farms at risk were those where the farming systems practices were unsuited to agro-ecological conditions. Also noted were farms with the potential to become at risk, because of changes in parameters such as population. Farms were ranked in terms of severity of risk, so that decisions could be made about where intervention would be most necessary or cost-effective.

Finally, areas of the country with the potential for agricultural development were studied, and areas of high conservation value or of volcanic risk were recorded.

The research team combined a large amount of previously collected data into a mappable farming systems database, providing a powerful tool for developing and implementing national and provincial planning. The team also developed a nation-wide agricultural research strategy for the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI).

The two full-time PNG researchers in the project received intensive hands-on training in the use of geographic information systems (GIS), ArcView, MASP and PNGRIS databases, and in how to interrogate the systems to address key research and management issues. Both of these researchers now train other staff at both provincial and national levels, and also run courses at UNITECH in Lae. NARI subsequently employed them.

It is clear that these two have achieved a high facility in manipulating and integrating the database (and in producing meaningful and intelligible GIS based output). However the impact goes beyond this, as they now process and meet hundreds of requests for output annually from the private sector, government and NGOs.

The user-friendly mappable farming systems database created by the project can define database farming systems by their agricultural practices and crops and also by demographic, socioeconomic and accessibility factors. Farming systems can now be defined by a vulnerability index and by combinations of vulnerability, estimated income, accessibility and demographic measures.

The database is a powerful tool for national and sub-national planning and for the development of a national agricultural research strategy for NARI. Using the new technologies and techniques, NARI researchers are focusing on how farmers can best use their resources while ensuring sustainable land management and agricultural production. The facilitation of sub-national planning is also important, since devolution in PNG government has put pressure on local authorities to undertake district-level planning.