Word: papua
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Lunch at the site of the future Ramu nickel and cobalt mine in the remote hills of Papua New Guinea is a hurried affair, food shoveled into eager mouths. But the menu is as divided as the two distinct groups of workers squatting in the heat, swatting away flies and filling their bellies before their nine-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts begin again. In one huddle are local laborers chewing chunks of sweet potato and the canned fish known in pidgin dialect as tinpis. In another clump are imported workers from China who dig into rice topped with pork...
...many Papua New Guineans, it's not surprising that their nation stands on the front lines of China's global campaign. Located on the eastern half of the world's second largest island, P.N.G. is the most linguistically diverse region of the world, with at least 800 distinct local languages spoken by just 6.5 million people. Yet despite the tribal diversity, the nation is unified in at least one aspect: suspicion of foreign exploitation of its plentiful resources, ranging from natural gas and timber to fisheries and gold. Tensions exploded in the 1990s on the P.N.G. island of Bougainville, where...
...Most notably, the company has agreed to a 2.5% ownership stake in the mine for a group of local landowners, although many others say they have been iced out of the deal. "For Chinese and Papua New Guineans, who are from such different cultures, it will naturally take some time for us to truly understand each other, and sometimes it is not easy," says Wu Xuefeng, deputy general manager at Ramu NiCo. "Our proposal to tackle all these challenges is to address them within our overall sustainability development framework, [and] we are glad that we have been improving along...
...family now live in P.N.G. The downtown building in which the Rickshaw is located also has a clothing shop, a variety store, a gaming bar and another eatery, all run by Chinese. When I ask about visas, he laughs and says immigration issues are not a problem in Papua New Guinea. "The locals don't know how to do trade, and the government knows that," says Liu. "If locals get money, they spend it immediately on liquor. The Chinese don't come here to enjoy life. We only come to make money...
...Humans won't be the only animals to benefit. Clearing land for palm-oil plantations is Indonesia's leading cause of deforestation, says a 2007 U.N. report, with Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua the three worst-affected provinces. Thanks largely to the global appetite for palm oil, which is found in everything from chocolate bars to biofuels, the natural habitat of endangered animals such as the orangutan and Borneo rhino shrinks further each year. REDD could save them, said a recent study of Kalimantan by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia. They believe that the revenues generated by preserving...