By IPS Correspondents
CANBERRA, Jul 1 2005 (IPS)

A group of Australian academics have accused a conservative think-tank of using inaccurate data to underpin claims that customary land in Papua New Guinea should be privatized because it was frustrating agricultural production.

Yam harvest festival - women stacking yams in village compound. Kiriwina. Credit: Caroline Penn - Panos Pictures

Hughes, whose career has spanned working for the World Bank and as professor at the Australian National University, is now a Senior Fellow with the conservative Sydney-based think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). The CIS is funded by mining, food, tobacco and a number of anonymous corporate donors.

Hughes has repeatedly singled out communal land ownership as a central barrier to improved social and economic development and argued that Australian government aid should be conditional on privatizing customary land. “Communal ownership has not permitted any country to develop. In Papua New Guinea, where 90 per cent of people live on the land, it is the principal cause of poverty,” she wrote in a July 2004 paper.

When in 2001 the World Bank proposed land registration and the privatization of public assets it sparked major protests in the capital, Port Moresby. In a brutal crackdown by police four university students were shot and killed.

Hughes dismisses the opposition to land privatization as being confined to “the Marxists at the University of Papua New Guinea who all think that communal land ownership and socialism is lovely.”

It is a claim rejected by Fingleton, who edited a collection of papers “Privatizing Land in the Pacific: A defence of customary tenures”, published last week by the Australia Institute, a centre-left think tank funded by individuals and private philanthropic foundations.

“Her analysis is fatally flawed because she has got the facts so wrong,” Fingleton told IPS. Fingleton, in collaboration with four other academics and consultants with over 100 years experience in PNG and the Pacific, dispute the central propositions that Hughes claims demonstrates the necessity of land privatization.

Michael Bourke, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Australian National University, reviewed the data on PNG agricultural production for the 20 years period that Hughes claimed it declined in. “Production has not declined since the 1990’s . and in fact there has been a fivefold increase in production over the period 1980-2000,” he wrote.

Bourke concludes that there is “vigorous” growth in agricultural production for domestic consumption, nearly all of which is from customary land.

Hughes, however, claims that any growth in production for domestic consumption was “not significant.” Asked what statistics she bases this conclusion on, Hughes told IPS “I did that in the sixties and seventies, but since then nothing has changed.”

In an interview in 2000 with CIS founder Greg Lindsay, Hughes was asked whether there were better solutions to PNG and Pacific nations than dependence on aid. “Well, the best and quickest way would be to cut them off without a shilling,” she bluntly stated.

Hughes insists that her comments were reported out of context. While she doesn’t back away from the statement, Hughes says she has always argued that since “for political reasons” the government is committed to providing aid, Australia should “try and give them aid well.”

While Hughes may have a reputation for being outspoken and blunt, she is well-connected. The conservative Howard government appointed her as a member of the Foreign Affairs Council which meets three times a year to provide advice on Australia’s aid policy to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer.

Hughes claims that the biggest beneficiaries of communal land ownership are the “big men” who monopolise the economic benefits from resource deals and are now arming themselves entrench their position of influence.

Tim Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Sydney Faculty of Economics and Business and a management committee member of the Sydney- based watchdog group, Aidwatch, dismisses Hughes claim. “Who are the bigger men than the bankers and mining companies that fund the CIS?,” he asked.

“It is typical of the neo-colonial approach to blame local corrupt elites for all the problems. Of course there is some truth to that there are local corrupt elites – but they are despised more by the local people than the big shots in Australia that do business with them,” he said.

Fingleton believes Hughes claims about the ‘big men’ reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of PNG culture. “The big men in traditional society . become big men by their ability to distribute wealth amongst their followers and it is an essential part of their role to keep on doing it. Privatizing land is the very thing that would move the big men out of the egalitarian role into a position of domination,” he told IPS.

Anderson, who is researching PNG community land ownership and economic development, believes that privatizing land would actually undermine the greatest potential for economic development.

“The people who are doing best are not either the people who are stuck in subsistence farming or the people who have sold their land and are reliant on cash crops. It is the people in the middle . who have got some part time work or a small business on the side as well as their land. They are the real success stories,” he said.

Excerpt: