Inside Out | Is Papua New Guinea ready for the digital revolution?

Papua New Guinea’s year of chairmanship of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) group began in earnest last week, with the arrival in Port Moresby of hundreds of jet-lagged Apec officials and business representatives (me included) for the first cluster of senior official meetings.

Management of the Apec process, leading up to the meeting of Apec’s leaders in November, will stretch what is arguably the poorest and least developed member to its limits. But it also offers local officials and businesses the opportunity to alter international perceptions of their tiny, remote country. And, just as importantly, it gives visiting Apec officials a rare opportunity to see the world’s challenges through wholly new and uncomfortable lenses.

By almost any measure you take, PNG is an exotic outlier. I still remember as a five-year-old at primary school in England using cowrie shells from PNG as counters in my earliest arithmetic lessons, unaware that the country used seashells as currency until 1933. I also remember as a social anthropology student at university studying in awe the works of Bronislaw Malinowski on the culture of the Trobriand Islanders, not realising then that the Trobriand Islands were part of the PNG, and never dreaming I would one day come visiting.

The World Bank ranks it among the poorest countries in the world, with a GDP of around US$17 billion – ranked 115th worldwide. With a population of barely eight million, dispersed across impenetrable jungle-covered mountain ranges spanning an area almost that of Spain, it boasts 852 known languages. Only English and “Tok Pisin”, which we in the west call Pidgin English, allow its people to talk to each other. There is no road link between Port Moresby, its capital, and the second largest city of Lae. In fact Port Moresby has no road links to any town of substance. All contact – and all trade – is by air onto one of the country’s 580 mostly unpaved airstrips.

While ExxonMobil and a few other global oil and gas companies have begun the process of transforming the economic foundations of the country with the export of liquefied natural gas, still 87 per cent of PNG’s people work in subsistence agriculture, and 28 per cent of its GDP is accounted for by agriculture – a scale of dependence on the farm sector matched only in Asia by Myanmar (with 38 per cent of GDP in agriculture, and 70 per cent of the workforce). About half the population lives below the World Bank’s miserable poverty line, and more than 80 per cent are illiterate.

Not surprisingly, barely 20 per cent of the population have access to the internet, which is (from personal experience) appallingly slow, and very expensive.

All the more surprising, therefore, that our first Apec discussions plunged right in at the deep end – exploring the digital revolution, future jobs, and what officials should best do to guide Apec economies into the wrenching transitions ahead in the world of work. PNG must surely be among the world’s least likely places in which to debate the digital revolution. Discussions on artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things seem centuries away when even basic internet has a very fragile toehold.