PNG drought shaping up to be worse than '97

Transcript

A specialist in Papua New Guinea agriculture and food says the drought gripping the country will place a range of great strains on many people.

Drought over recent months and frosts in the last few weeks in the Highland provinces in particular have destroyed many essential food sources.

Mike Bourke from the Australian National University says it's PNG's worst drought in eighteen years.

He spoke to Johnny Blades who asked if the experience of the 1997 drought will help PNG communities cope with the current one.

MIKE BOURKE: '97 is very much in people's minds and it was very, very dramatic and so that's a positive. If you think of what happened in '97, the last time there was anything comparable was 1941, and in some communities there was no one alive who had been born or anything more than an infant in 1941. But now you do have memory of what happened the last time. Having said that, I do think this is much more serious than '97, or early indications are that in August 2015, it's a lot more serious than what it was in August 1997.

JOHNNY BLADES: And from what you saw in '97, do you think some of these parts which were also affected then, will the communities have adopted some resilience methods in terms of crop variations and so forth to cope this time?

MB: To some degree. After '97 in the lower altitude valleys in the Highlands, quite a few people started doing a lot more cassava. But you see cassava is really only any good up to about 1600 metres, it grows higher than that but doesn't yield that well. So in the lower valleys, below about 1600 metres, so Kopiago is one example, people plant a lot more cassava because it's a lot tougher than sweet potato. It was interesting: I was in Bougainville and one of comments from some of the villagers there was gee,  we knew that the sweet potato was affected by super wet weather, we knew all about that, but we didn't know about this drought business, and now we're putting a lot more bananas in. But at the end of the day, I think that's round the margin, my sense would be yes there's been some adaption but not enough to save people from what is appearing at the moment to be a pretty extreme event.

JB: Is this a situation where the National Agricultural Research Institute is actively prepared for, has seed banks or whatever, in case of this?

MB: They've done some research on drought-resistant sweet potato varieties and other such issues. I think there's a question mark about how much material they have on hand. I think the challenge at the moment is to take material, whether it's superior drought-resistant  or whether it's just anticipating a recovery phase when the rain comes and bulk up... when you do back of the envelope and look at the numbers, how many tonnes you need of sweet potato, potato and maize or corn - they are the three crops we're talking about - the numbers are seriously big. We are talking, again my back of the envelope (estimations)... If this event is the same magnitude as '97, we're talking about approximately of the order of two and a half million people who are very, very short of food; not impacted - that's a lot more than that - but what we call category 4 or category 5; category 4 is very little food left, category 5 is down to a very limited amount of famine food; Now that's if it's the same order of magnitude as '97. If it's of higher magnitude, more severe magnitude - and early indications seem to be that it may well be, and that's certainly the meteorological prediction, not only a stronger El Nino but also lasting a lot longer, lasting until next year - then those numbers go up. So just when you come back to planting material, how many tonnes or corn, seed... it's got to be the right corn, and you can't bring it in from Australia or New Zealand for example, they're all wrong; it's  got to be something that's adapted to growing fairly near the equator: varieties of potato, large quantities of English potato, Irish potato and also sweet potato. And again there's technical limitations here - you can't bring varieties all the way from the lowlands to the very high altitude, you can go from say 1600 metres to 2600 but you can't go from sealevel, so there are some technical limitations too.

JB: The disruption that this will bring, and is bringing already, must be massive?

MB: The biggest single thing is that many hundreds of thousands of people, households, are scavenging for food, eating food that they normally wouldn't eat. There's a thing called Pueraria, the base of a banana, if you can imagine the corm - it's a technical word - but it's the underground part of a banana. There's a whole lot of wild... there's lot and lots of leaves, there's a fig-type plant, there's wild yams, self-sewn yams which are not particularly palatable. So people are eating unusual food, or they're eating things in quantities that they normally wouldn't eat. People living on green pawpaw which they probably wouldn't otherwise eat, but also coconuts, people only eat so much coconut, but your diet then consists of pawpaw and coconuts and a few little baby crabs. So, tremendously disruptive, tremendously stressful. We're just talking about food now - but there's a whole lot of other elements here. There's water, there's health, there's migration. There's many elements to this. And education of course; in Enga province the provincial education secretary is saying they may have to close the schools down for a hundred thousand pupils in the coming weeks.

JB: You mentioned the health thing with people having to change diets and move around; some real vulnerabilities get needled at these times, don't they?

MB: Very much so and already the Chimbu support group is claiming a whole lot of health-related issues. El Nino diseases is the term they are using. But we know from '97 -  we don't have much hard data but a whole lot of reliable anecdotal data - that malaria in particular increased. It seems a bit counter intuitive when it's dry but what happens, the streams dry up and you have little tiny pools rather than running streams and the mosquitoes can build up in those little stagnant pools, so malaria increased; a lot more respiratory problems, skin problems, some dysentery, a lot of diarrhoea, quite a few reports of deaths from dysentery. I recall asking one health worker, he was telling me he'd lost six patients from memory in that particular area. I said how many would you normally lose? He said I might see one case a year and I never lose them. So to lose six is utterly extraordinary. And so there's a lot of health issues and that's on top of  a health system that's pretty strained and creaking at the best of times. SO you put this on top of it, it really puts a lot of pressure on the health system.