Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

Stanley Kaus, age 35, Sup Village Mushu Island, Mushu Community School Board ofManagement Member. From his experience as a school board member he said “bipo wanpelaskul pikinini tasol I save sik malaria em long wanpela de, tasol nau namba bilong ol pikinini issave sik long wanpela de I go antap long 4 na 5 olgeta. Oli kisim sik malaria na fly wantaim.”There are no major health issues in the village, but for children ages 4-7 years old alwaysgetting flu and cough after swimming in the sea. When they go for treatment at the aid post theorderly tells them not to wash in the sea because the fishing vessels and the loining factory isdischarging waste into the sea. When children wash in the sea their whole body is oily andsticky.Environmental issues: Before they catch tuna along the shoreline and they enjoyed fishing buttoday they have to go further out in the ocean to catch tuna and also they don’t catch as many asbefore. Last year, 2004, they found two dead dolphins and one whale dead on the beach. Theysaw an oil spill from the ship floating along the shoreline and waste from the loining factorywas dumped between Mushu and Wokyo (Vokeo?) Island and that waste attracts sharks sowhen diving at night they’re afraid of sharks.Economic issues: The South Seas Tuna company promised them spin off businesses likechicken projects and the company would pay royalties directly to landowners. As they wereisland people the company told them to build guest houses so that the company workers can rentthem out on weekends. But as years passed, nothing happened. The company also promised thatpriority will be given to the island people to work in the loining factory but since the operationstarted only five ladies have work there and two were sacked , so now only three are working atSST from Mushu.The islanders’ main source of cash is copra, fish and garden crops—cocoa and vanilla, whichwas introduced lately. They use nets and fishing lines to catch fish. Before they caught manyfish in a day and sell in the market, where they would get K200-3000 a day. But today they sayit’s very hard so it takes three days to get the fish that will sell for K200-3000 at market.u. ConclusionsIn one sense, SST represents an important site of PNG’s labour transformation, from a use valueto exchange value system. But exchange values have long been a part of PNG society, and whilethey have implicated social relations and traditional use values, nowehere is the context asthorouigh as that of a factory, where workers must forsake their whole day (and all traditionalsocial activities) to ear wage labor. In this case, the factory also makes no pretense of a socialquid pro quo in the provision of real benefits like transportation, a viable wage, or managementtraining. The factory operates as a self-sufficient entity, the quintessential Western individual,rather like the early colonial administrator, whose investment in this ‘savage’ land could never beconstrued as personal.One of the most important characteristics of contemporary industrialization is the increasingstress on export production. Given the pressure by global lending institutions like the IMF andWorld Bank on replacing imports with export production, we will no doubt see processingfactories being established more and more frequently in the developing world. In a recent study ofindustrialization in Korea, Seung-kyung Kim (Rothstein and Blim 1992:207-238) WomenWorkers and the Labor Movement in South Korea) describes how in order to promote exportproduction, the South Korean government increased state involvement, first in the creation of164