Papua New Guinea, 2008

On behalf of my

people and the Government of Papua New Guinea, I

bring the General Assembly warm greetings and pledge

our support to you, Mr. President, as you guide us in

our work. We also wish to thank Mr. Kerim, your

predecessor, for his strong advocacy during his tenure

as President of the General Assembly at its sixty-second

session, especially in the area of climate change. We

also support Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the

United Nations in general, especially its agencies, in

the work they do to enhance our development

aspirations in Papua New Guinea. As we have always

done, my Government continues to support the United

Nations.

The United Nations currently provides the world

forum for Member States to address the many global

issues we face together. United Nations reforms need

to be carried out in all the relevant areas of the system.

We need to address the international gender

architecture to make it more robust, responsive and

effective. It has to be part of the core reform process to

cater for women, youth and children. We must also be

vigilant against terrorism and threats to international

peace and security. The One UN system needs to be

translated more meaningfully in order to effectively

enhance each Member State’s development priorities.

We support the call for the reform of the Security

Council in both the permanent and non-permanent

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categories of membership. A number of emerging

developing countries need to be accorded permanent

status on the Council to better reflect today’s

circumstances. We therefore welcome the recent

consensus to initiate the intergovernmental negotiating

process to properly address the long-standing but

critical issue of United Nations reform.

We live in a world that provides us many

opportunities, as well as formidable development

challenges. The challenges include addressing the

destructive effects of the illicit use of small arms and

light weapons and the need to address globalization

and food and energy security, which lead into the wider

issue of human security.

Additionally, the adverse impacts of climate

change and global warming continue to threaten the

existence of many small island States, especially due to

rising sea levels. For many small island States, sea

level rise and the adverse impacts of climate change

are security issues threatening their very survival. We

therefore call upon the international community to act

urgently in order to ensure the security and welfare of

small island developing States.

As a thriving democracy in the Pacific, Papua

New Guinea desires to see our friends and neighbours

in the Pacific and beyond enjoy freedom and

prosperity. In that regard, and consistent with the

decision of the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum,

Papua New Guinea strongly encourages Fiji to restore

parliamentary democracy by preparing for elections

and holding them in 2009. However, Fiji must be

supported throughout, and not isolated in its efforts to

address its specific national circumstances.

On other regional issues, Papua New Guinea

commends the work done so far on the Pacific Plan for

Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Integration,

which we believe may catalyse our region’s

development. It is Papua New Guinea’s strong view

that Member States from the Pacific region should be

categorized separately by the United Nations in terms

of aggregated data and in the area of social and

economic classification. While Papua New Guinea is

ready, we can support Vanuatu’s call for an extension

to the May 2009 deadline for submissions on an

extended continental shelf.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

provide us with one of the greatest opportunities to

leverage our development process. For that reason, we

commend the Secretary-General for convening the

high-level meeting on the MDGs during the present

session of the General Assembly. However, for the

MDGs to be effectively implemented, they must be

addressed consistent with national circumstances and

with host-country leadership. Further, for the MDGs to

be effective over the long term, developing countries

must take ownership of the Goals.

At the midway point of MDG implementation, for

Papua New Guinea, we believe there is cause for

cautious optimism. Papua New Guinea celebrated

33 years of unbroken constitutional democracy on

16 September this year. Due to the political stability

achieved by my Government, we can now afford to

plan long-term for our own development. We have had

steady economic growth in the last five years, due to

prudent economic management that has resulted in five

successive budget surpluses.

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals

remains an integral development priority for my

Government. We have set ourselves 15 national targets

and 67 indicators, which have been integrated into our

medium-term development strategy and sectoral plans.

For example, Papua New Guinea recognizes that

education is a prerequisite for the betterment of our

people’s lives. That is entrenched in our constitution

and prioritized under a 10-year national education plan.

The current one-laptop-per-child pilot project will

make learning accessible, enjoyable and fruitful for our

children, while bridging the digital divide. We are

looking to expand the project nationwide during the

Africa Caribbean Pacific-European Union Joint

Parliamentary Assembly, to be held in Papua New

Guinea in November. In partnership with UNICEF, we

have also introduced proactive programmes aimed at

accelerating the girl-child’s access to education.

In the area of health, there remain major

challenges, such as maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS,

which the Government is now addressing through the

10-year national health plan. We have also recorded

some positive results in other major health indicators,

including a decrease in malaria incidence and in

malaria-related deaths, and the stabilization and

decline of infant and child mortality.

Ultimately, reducing poverty, expanding access to

education and health and empowering women through

economic and social participation are what we in my

Government are addressing.

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Millennium Development Goal 8 makes reference

to partnerships. We strongly believe that Goal is

critical to the achievement of the other seven. We

believe, however, that all partnerships must be

underpinned by mutual respect among the partners. For

that reason, let me highlight some key partnerships.

Our partnerships with Australia, New Zealand, the

European Union, Japan, China, Italy, Austria and many

non-governmental organizations continue to contribute

strongly to Papua New Guinea’s development. We also

partner with the Coral Triangle Initiative on coral reefs,

fisheries and food security, and the Forest-11 Group,

launched last year by His Excellency the President of

Indonesia. Another important partnership is with the

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, facilitated by the

Clinton Foundation, in the area of HIV/AIDS and the

provision of antiretrovirals.

To succeed, we must significantly scale up our

partnerships. Often, we all tend to wallow in the

negative — environmental degradation, catastrophic

climate change, crippling poverty, ineffective

governance — rather than leveraging the positive. My

Government’s vision is to transform those societal

challenges into a framework for environmentally and

socially sustainable economic growth. It is time to cast

off policy chains of the past and create a new paradigm

for the future.

Let me be specific. First, we cannot account for

the environment as an externality. Our natural

environment and its services are not free to society.

Once we lose those services, often irreversibly, the

costs can be significant.

Secondly, we must create a broad framework for

ecosystem service markets. Carbon sequestration must

only be the first step, followed by valuations for

biodiversity, water purification, rainfall generation,

crop pollination and food security.

Thirdly, we must now view our natural

environment as an engine for wealth creation. Those

valuable ecosystem services must be transformed into

lasting wealth that supports the rural communities that

have traditionally cared for those assets.

Let me use the issue of reducing deforestation

and forest degradation — an issue that our Prime

Minister, Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, has

championed internationally — as an example.

Deforestation is a complex subject, but, put simply, it

is driven by the fact that the world values forests more

dead than alive. Traditional economic theory, which

considers ecosystem services a common good and thus

free to all, is primarily responsible for the massive loss

of the world’s forests.

With those ecosystem services valued at zero,

rural communities that depend on and care for forests

must make a living in other ways. Keeping the land

forested means sacrificing the opportunities to be

gained by converting it to other uses, such as

producing commodities such as timber, palm oil, coffee

and cocoa. The international commodity markets, in

fact, have hardly changed from colonial times.

In many ways, those two economic relics are

increasingly perverse and nonsensical. The

environment is devastated, rural communities stay poor

and the rich shift the blame. They cite lack of

governance and corruption, but those are not drivers of

deforestation, but symptoms of obsolete market

constructs.

Therefore, global leaders must redraft economic

theory and reinvent global markets for a sustainable

future. For example, the latest estimate is that

approximately $20 billion a year will be needed to

halve carbon emissions resulting from deforestation.

However, that would be a wise investment, even for

that one ecosystem service alone. Forests sequester

some 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. So,

with today’s price of more than $30 per ton of carbon

dioxide, rural communities are effectively subsidizing

the carbon emissions of the rich to the tune of

approximately $100 billion per year — more than total

annual official development assistance.

Norway has provided great leadership towards

that necessary paradigm shift. First, Norway has stood

up against global climate change and has targeted the

achievement of carbon neutrality by 2030. Norway has

also dedicated $2.8 billion to offset emissions

reductions resulting from deforestation in developing

countries, through the valuation of forest ecosystem

services.

Faced by the ravages of climate change on a

small island developing State, our Prime Minister, Sir

Michael Somare, has charted out his own bold goals:

reducing Papua New Guinea’s emissions by 50 per cent

before 2025 and achieving carbon neutrality before

2050. Sharing a similar vision, the partnership of

leadership between Papua New Guinea and Norway

may significantly address several of the greatest

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challenges of our time: effectively valuing global

environmental services, contributing to the mitigation

of climate change, conserving global biodiversity and

financing the achievement of the Millennium

Development Goals in rural areas.

Finally, our global economy values companies in

the billions simply for advertising trinkets on the

Internet. Some countries make billions by selling fossil

fuels that pollute our atmosphere, others by producing

low-cost consumer products that humanity does not

require. In fact, Google is worth $150 billion, while the

world’s last great tropical forests left standing are

worth nothing. How can that be right?

Together, we must reconstruct our value

frameworks. New environmental markets must support

tropical countries striving to achieve sustainable

development, by generating billions from rainforest

ecosystem services that humanity has so far been

exploiting for free.

Several communities in my country have voted to

cancel their logging concessions, telling me that the

forests and rivers have provided all they needed for

thousands of years. In some ways, however, they now

feel trapped. The old ways allowed them to survive but

did not prepare their children for an increasingly

complex future. They now struggle with schools that

cannot afford the best teachers and with health centres

that provide only basic medicines. Yet those

communities still remember how to live sustainably —

a skill that many others have forgotten in the rush to

get ahead.

But there is hope. Bold leadership is required on

both sides of the economic divide to transform the way

in which we value our environment and create wealth

for rural populations. As leaders, we must understand

that, while we may have inherited the Earth from our

forefathers, we have in fact borrowed it from our

grandchildren and our future generations. Indeed, by

learning to save our environment, perhaps we can once

again learn how to save ourselves and guarantee a

better world for our future generations.