PAPUA NEW GUINEA DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES
KUMUL DISCUSSION FORUM




 Return to Kumul Development Forum  

Re: All i can say is Shut-Up

May 4 2006 at 4:46 PM
No score for this post
Anonymous 


Response to All i can say is Shut-Up

Is it "talking sense" to continue to allow foreign investment, which gives PNG a few toea and brings out of PNG a few kina for the investment? No one "foreign invests" unless they figure on making a lot of money. When foreign investors take the money they make and re-invest it in the country, that's one issue. But in PNG, most of the re-investment we have seen is window dressing - it's just done to hide the billions of kina through the years that have left PNG. This has been a major contribution to the decline of our kina.

Window dressing foreign re-investment includes the kind of giaman processing in which a tiny fraction of a PNG resource is processed onshore (like our tuna, or the RH plywood factory) while a huge amount of unprocessed raw material is exported behind the scenes where we never bother to look.

Window dressing foreign re-investment includes RH's establishment of stores which serve to bring back the kina they pay out in logging royalties so that it goes back into their own hands as naive Papua New Guineans buy products in those stores.

This kind of foreign investment is what dominates in PNG today.

This kind of foreign investment helps foreign development more than it helps PNG development.

I assume that since you support foreign investment, you see nothing wrong with all this??

 
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.Respond to this message   
About this board - the Kumul Discussion Forum is administered and set up by PNGScape with the permission of the founder of the board and the Kumul Foundation pursuant to the Kumul Foundation's object of facilitating discussion and debate on issues of significance to Papua New Guinea's national development. The old Kumul board can be found at www.voy.com/1950/ Discussion must be conducted respectfully, and rationally, with the object being that the dissemination of ideas will lead to action that will contribute to PNG's ongoing development.

Remember, PNG's destiny is ours too!