The National Agriculture Quarantine and Inspection Authority (NAQIA) managed the incursion of coffee berry borer (CBB) in PNG with no government funding.
Apart from the CBB, NAQIA is also managing the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Southern Highlands, Enga and Hela.
Biosecurity refers to animal and plant health measures that prevent the introduction, establishment and spread of pests and diseases.
This is one of the core functions of NAQIA; it plays an important role in supporting the agriculture sector where more than 80 percent of Papua New Guineans derive their livelihood from.
Managing Director, Joel Alu, lamented that government support – through budgetary allocation – has been non-existent for the agency.
“NAQIA has never been funded for a long, long time,” he stated. “We’ve never received any money for the last six months until the beginning of June, we got some money from the Finance Department so the first thing we wanted to do was this workshop,” he said, referring to the recent final stakeholder consultation workshop on the biosecurity bill.
“Because of funding issues, there are a lot of challenges. Challenge in the sense that we are not able to send our quarantine officers to do monitoring and surveillance to find out whether we have diseases in country or diseases are arriving and at the same time, to make sure that our ports of entry, the borders like Madang, Lae, which is our biggest port – our officers are there 24 hours to make sure that containers that are coming in are not carrying harmful pests and diseases.
“We don’t have the facilities, the infrastructure, including x-ray machines, sniffer dogs, training that some of our quarantine officers need to go through. There’s no school for quarantine officers in this country but it’s on the job that they go through it, by doing inspection of cargoes and everything, they acquire their knowledge and skills.”
Alu said currently, PNG has the coffee berry borer and the African Swine Fever. For the CBB, which is considered one of the most devastating coffee pests in the world, NAQIA managed it with no government support.
When the first case of African Swine Fever was reported in Mendi, Southern Highlands Province, on March 28th, 2020, NAQIA swiftly responded by mobilising personnel and resources to the ASF declared areas. This was done with the support of the Australian and New Zealand governments through the Pacific Horticultural and Agricultural Market Access (PHAMA) Plus Program.
Alu stressed that the PNG Government needs to prioritise NAQIA if it is concerned about the agriculture, livestock and poultry sectors.