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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