Alcohol ban for Papua New Guinea province

Sydney - An alcohol ban that is to come into force in Papua New Guinea's restive Southern Highlands province in May is needed to quell tribal violence that has cost dozens of lives since the start of the year, the local police chief said Friday. "Liquor contributes to at least 75 per cent of the law and order problems," Superintendent Jimmy Onopia told Australian public broadcaster ABC.

The Southern Highlands, home to 550,000 people, is the most populous of Papua New Guinea's 20 provinces and the location of a crucially important liquefied natural gas (LNG) project.

Inter-clan violence last month prompted ExxonMobil Corp to halt work on sections of a 600-kilometer pipeline that is part of a gas project costing 14 billion US dollars.

Minister for Community Development Carol Kidu blamed the violence on squabbles over LNG royalties rather than drunkenness.

"Suddenly, with this LNG project and all of the tensions and jealousies over the land ownership and all these things, it blew up into a tribal war, a village war, an inter-village war," she said last week.

The Australian National University's Aaron Batten, a specialist on Pacific economies, said the Southern Highlands was likely to go the way of other Papua New Guinea provinces where the exploitation of natural resources had created a cash flow.

"PNG's history bears these risks out all too well," he said. "Those provinces which have recorded the largest earnings from resource extraction have been plagued by the weakest governance, the poorest levels of service delivery and in many cases by violence."

Papua New Guinea, a country of 6.6 million, is 148th out of 182 countries in the United Nations' human development index. Earlier this week the capital, Port Moresby, was fourth from the bottom in The Economist magazine's annual survey of the world's most livable cities.

In a ranking that took into account factors like healthcare, culture, environment and education, Port Moresby was ahead of only Harare in Zimbabwe, Dhaka in Bangladesh and Algeria's capital Algiers.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/308854,alcohol-ban-for-papua-new-guinea-province.html.