ABSTRACT
Not much more than a decade ago, many in the small community of scholars, activists, and health practitioners working on HIV in Papua New Guinea hoped that the epidemic might remain confined to Port Moresby, the national capital – at least long enough for an effective prevention strategy to be mounted. Road infrastructure is undeveloped in the country and it is impossible to travel far from Port Moresby except by plane or boat. Few roads lead out of the city, and none of them link to another urban centre or to the Highlands Highway, the main artery bisecting the country from east to west. With the capital city so divorced from the rest of the country, and with 85 per cent of the population living in rural areas, it was hoped that the epidemic could be stemmed before it had a chance to become generalized. At the same time, it was also known that Papua New Guinea shares many
characteristics with countries that have a high prevalence of HIV, including an economy dependent on mining; contraction of economic opportunity, particularly in rural areas; a very young population; severe deterioration of basic health services, including closure of rural aid posts and health centres in the 1990s (Duke 1999); and high rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis, and other sexually transmitted infections, with some studies showing long delays in treatment seeking (Passey 1998; Hughes 2002). In addition, although mobility in and out of Port Moresby is constrained, the main arteries in the rest of the country connect seven of the provincial capitals to each other, and many unpaved roads link rural communities to these main arteries. Moreover, since at least the 1960s, plantation labour recruitment policies, population relocation schemes, and the development of the mining industry have helped create a highly mobile male population. The supposition that HIV might stay confined to urban centres did not ade-
quately take into account this longstanding high level of mobility. Similarly, social science research in Papua New Guinea has overlooked the issue, and has not yet systematically focused on the relationship between labour migration and HIV risk. There are, however, older anthropological, geographical, and historical literatures on labour-related mobility in Papua New Guinea. This chapter attempts to show the relevance of this literature for understanding current HIV
risk, and for generating important research questions. For example, the chapter discusses the way in which quite different regional histories of population movement were created during the Australian colonial era when some communities in Papua New Guinea were given strong incentives – such as free seedlings and infrastructure improvements – to become cash croppers, while others were deliberately cultivated as labour-exporting regions. These different histories of mobility, in turn, gave rise to different patterns of sexual networking, and thus of HIV vulnerability (Thornton 2008). Different regional histories of migration also generated different cultures of migration – that is, community-specific ways of investing meaning in the act: whether migration is frowned upon or a source of prestige; what a family will expect when a migrant returns home; and how this varies by age, gender, and marital status. For example, in some communities with a long and intensive history of male out-migration, working away from home has become a typical stage in the male life-course and a formative part of masculinity. The chapter begins with an overview of HIV in Papua New Guinea, then
discusses the specific economic development policies, both colonial and more recent, that have shaped labour migration in the country. Three points emerge: (1) one consequence of uneven development has been that some communities have been targeted as sources of labour for other regions, and thus that a stint of labour migration has become a normative stage in masculine development in these communities; (2) population relocation schemes that were meant to alleviate land pressures were short-sighted in planning for migrants’ descendants, thus leading to economic insecurity, particularly for women; (3) mining company labour policies, particularly their privileging of local communities as sources of labour, contribute to particular patterns of sexual networking and HIV-related risk.
