IN response to an agreement signed between the PNG Tourism Promotion Authority (TPA) and OK Tedi landowner group as reported in the PNG media, Dr. Robert Bino in Port Moresby said the arrangement could be seen as tourism could be pursued as a land-use option especially when the same physical space was previously subjected to mining as a first-preference land-use option.
He claimed that ‘thinking’ is a myth and should not be promoted. “Now that mining is over in OK Tedi, and the landowners could opt to switch to tourism as a replacement land-use activity is a wrong perception,” he added.
“Mining in PNG context happens at a great cost to the natural environment whist branded tourists who visit PNG tends to be environmental enthusiasts, keen on enjoying the range of products that nature has to offer such as bird-watching. After the mining, all the birds around OK Tedi could have fled the area due to noise pollution.” Dr. Bino lamented.
“For tourism as a land-use option, mining in PNG context had been environmental-destructive at a cataclysmic scale and therefore it is misleading to depict the notion and wrongly promote the illusion that landowners still have the option of tourism to pursue when industrial-scale mining terminates on their land,” he said in a statement to PNG media.
Instead the tourism planning should be part of any mining and the extractive industry planning and issuing of operating licenses to developers coming into the country.
TPA and other tourism stakeholders as well as the PNG Tourism Ministry should be looking at tourism development plans when the mining wants to start and not when it ends. - Via Garamut News.
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