Landowners predict uprising in PNG's southern Highlands oil fields
Updated
Tension is simmering in Papua New Guinea's southern Highlands over the PNG Liquid Natural Gas project led by Exxon Mobil with landowners from Hides converging on the Department of Petroleum and Energy in Konedobu, threatening to disrupt the project unless their demands are met. There have already been claims that at least one bridge has been blown up with predictions of violence to follow.
Presenter Barbara Heggen
Speakers: Hides Tribal Leader Andreas Wabiria, Hides Landowner Simon Eganda
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BARBARA HEGGEN: The $11 billion project led by Exxon Mobil is in its initial engineering stage. The company plans to be delivering LNG from the Southern Highlands and western provinces by 2014 but it faces a rocky road. The PNG government has initiated benefit sharing agreements to be signed by various landowners but it also agreed to conduct comprehensive landowner identification studies to determine which landowners it should be negotiating with. Andreas Wabiria from the Hides area says the government has pre-empted this process by inviting landowners to sign agreements before identification studies have been done.
ANDREAS WABIRIA: How can you negotiate a legally binding agreement to develop a multi billion kina project on a public place where every dog on the street would want to have a say? Landowners who claim to be landowners have to have a clearly demarcated piece of land within the PBL boundaries so that they will be eligible to trade in the development forum process as required by law.
BARBARA HEGGEN: Mr Wabiria says the government has had at least two years to conduct appropriate studies and is now under pressure from project financiers to fastrack the process.
ANDREAS WABIRIA: Up to now nothing has been done and now they are just trying to bulldoze everything and it's unbelievable that the Department of Petroleum and Energy has not learned from. The Department of Petroleum and Energy is to be blamed for everything that is happening in the oil and gas sector.
BARBARA HEGGEN: Landowners are also demanding a 30% equity in the project. Another tribal leader Simon Eganda says it's a demand that can't be negotiated down.
SIMON EGANDA: These are our resources, it's on our land. So we don't want to be a spectator - we want to be a participant in the project by carrying 30% equity into the project and we want to own it. And if I says there is no project then there is no project.
BARBARA HEGGEN: A report in one PNG newspaper claims that villagers have already taken matters into their own hands by blowing up a bridge. That report is unconfirmed by Mr Wabiria says the government faces a Bougainville-style uprising if it doesn't follow due process.
ANDREAS WABIRIA: I'm pretty sure it will be even worse than Bougainville because Bougainville, as you know, is an island, the conflict was isolated in an island. But the Hides is here and most of the landowners in the Hides are here in Port Moresby - they live in settlements in and around Port Moresby - and one of the settlements is about one kilometre out from the Papua New Guinea National Parliment. So the fight is not out there in the Hides, the fight is not out there in the villages. The fight or the war or whatever you want to call it will be here in the streets of Port Moresby.
