East Sepik Governor Allan Bird Photo: ANDREW KUTAN
The Governor of Papua New Guinea's East Sepik province has called for a greater emphasis on creating jobs in agriculture to help address the scarcity of job opportunities across the country.
Allan Bird has told local media that the lack of job opportunities is the biggest crisis facing the country, and warning that is holding the country's young people back in a way that hurts communities for generations.
Speaking to RNZ Pacific, Bird said it was clear that sectors which create sustainable jobs need to be grown.
He said successive governments had focused too much on mining and gas sectors which create only limited, short-term jobs for locals.
"We've got to really start figuring out which industries we're going to develop, create the opportunities for all these young people," Bird said.
"We've got a population now of about, what, 10 million. There's less than a million people formally employed. So we sort of need to be creating 50 or 60,000 jobs a year."
Bird, who is an opposition MP, said that to turn the situation around required government policy with a long-term vision and better engagement with the private sector in order to foster investment in sustainable industries.
Food production in Papua New Guinea Photo: RNZ / Johnny Blades
A significant proportion of the Government Budget goes towards the public sector, and Prime Minister James Marape has been urging people to go online and apply for public service jobs in 2026.
Marape used his New Year's message to underline his government's plan to use artificial intelligence systems in public service recruitment, touting 2026 as the year that PNG will use AI as a tool to strengthen governance and efficiency across the public service.
"If you want a job, you apply online. If you want a government contract, you apply online. The best must get the job. These reforms will reduce human interference and strengthen meritocracy, transparency and efficiency," Marape said.
But not everyone in PNG has access to apply for a job online, and many communities are not in the position to take advantage of AI tools to give them agency in their current livelihood.
Most people across the country have livelihoods in subsistence living, from which they earn in the informal economy. Bird, who has an extensive background in agribusiness and development of cash crops like cocoa and vanilla, said PNG needed to play to its grassroots strengths by supporting farmers and growers.
Cocoa tree in Papua New Guinea Photo: RNZ
According to the MP, there's at least seven million hectares of untapped land in PNG that could be used for agriculture. The returns would be longer term rather than immediate.
"It could take you seven to eight to ten years. So government needs to take those kind of time frames and work towards those kind of things, and then obviously, when you're producing a lot of something, whatever that is - whether it's sheep or milk or whatever - then you get the processing plants and those sorts of things that go with it, and then you value add and create more jobs," he said.
Given PNG's huge agricultural potential, Bird said government could be doing a lot more to foster private sector investment in the sector.
"There's absolutely no funding to support either the policy mechanisms or at least to go out and talk to landowners and figure out where their land boundaries are and sort out a mechanism where the land can be utilised by a third party investor or whoever," he said.