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
A/63/PV.13
3 08-53122
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.
A/63/PV.13
08-53122 4
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
A/63/PV.13
5 08-53122
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.