THE Highlands Highway of Papua New Guinea that serves as a vital transport link for the three million people living in Highlands is in such disrepair that locals claim it has become a death trap, while businesses say they will have to shut down if the road is not repaired.

The road connects the Highlands region, and is home to the country’s K500 million a year coffee and K200 million a year tea industries, organically grown vegetables, the Porgera gold mine which is ranked the world’s fourth largest gold mine, the Kutubu oil and gas projects and the country’s biggest liquefied natural gas project, under construction at present.

Life for the inhabitants and businesses have taken a battering for a very long time, but it has been really bad in the last decade due to the deteriorating condition of the highway, built in the 1970s through rugged mountainous terrain.

“Life in the Highlands, as we know it now, depends on the highway. When we have a blockage, all supplies to the Highlands are cut off, store goods run out, medical supplies run low, schools go without supplies — this road is our lifeline,” said Elizabeth Waugla.
Waugla, a mother of seven lives in Chimbu, and she travels to Lae, located about 300km away from where she lives, to visit her husband and three children monthly.

PMV driver like John Muglua says travelling on the highway is an ordeal. “Your body aches all over at the end of the day,” Muglua said. Motorists say there are two to three roadblocks per week and the situation is particularly bad during the wet season, which starts in September to January each year.

The region is served by airports, but the high cost of airfares means most people prefer to go by road. The 600km highway, which for the most part is no more than a two-lane road, connects a number of Papua New Guiena's major towns and serves as an essential link to the coastal ports of Lae and Madang. But frequent landslides and washouts mean parts of the highway are often impassable and accidents are frequent.

Twenty-two deaths and countless injuries were reported between February and March this year. Crime on the highway has been another concern, with trucking firms losing cargo from their trucks that break down on the road and armed robberies
Businesses that depend on the highway to survive are concerned about the current state of the road.

WR TK Carpenters and Company, Papua New Guinea’s leading tea and coffee producer, may cease operations because of the state of the highway, as they are unable to deliver their produce to markets as well as bring in inputs for their estates.

“If we don’t have the ability to market our produce and generate revenue or get our inputs like fuel and fertilizer for our plantations, we will be forced to shut down, and that will be within weeks,” Ramesh Vasudevan, general manager, said.

A study done by the National Research Institute in 2007 found that trucking firms lose more than K27 million a year to crime, wear and tear on vehicles as well as failure to meet contractual obligations.

“This will certainly go up. If the Government does not think we need the highway, then shut it down, forget Papua New Guinea and let’s all go home,” Jacob Luke, managing director of Mapai Transport said. Public transport operators claim their cost has shot up to K600 per week while trucking firms were forced to spend up to K7000 more per trip than three years ago.

The coffee industry has voiced its concerns too. “We are penalised. We get less money for our coffee because the markets have to look elsewhere to buy substitutes for PNG coffee,” said Jerry Kapka, managing director of Kongo Coffee Limited. Experts say it would take about K2.4 billion to rebuild the highway while an annual budget of K51 million would be needed for year-round maintenance.

“The highway, as it is today, will cost up to K3 million per kilometre to bring it up to a fully serviced road,” Godfrid Umba, a leading civil engineer said. Mr Umba said the K30 million allocated by the National Government was not enough.

The Department of Works, the state agent that takes care of roads in Papua New Guinea, says the country’s 9000km road network needs K3.6 billion over the next three years for repairs. The Department of Works says repairs to existing 9000km roads as priority.
There is a backlog of maintenance of K1.2 billion per year for the next three years and a continuous program of maintenance of K9 million thence,” said Secretary Joel Luma.

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