Climate change starvation death toll

It has been reported that an elderly lady has passed away on the Carteret Islands due to starvation experienced by the loss of food gardens due to rising seas.

Unemployment benefit

It has been reported that there are over 3 million people eligible for work within PNG and only 270,000 of these have work in the formal sector. The unemployed rely on subsistence farming and their relatives and wantoks, or the wantok system, which has many good and many bad points. A wantok is literally a person who speaks the same language as you and with over 800 languages and no unemployment benefits in PNG some people might only have a handful of wantok’s clambering after their hard earned Kina each fortnight while others have many more than this.

The positive side of the wantok system provides hardship alleviation whilst the negative side sees it undermine the economic advancement of entire kinship groups and retards progress towards escaping temporary poverty because it adversely impacts on a household\'s income.

Languages of PNG

The National or official languages of PNG are Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin and English.

The number of languages listed for Papua New Guinea is 832. Of those, 823 are living languages and nine are considered to be extinct.

For information on the languages a visit to  http://www.sultry.arts.usyd.edu.au/ling/research/papuan2.html will start you off in the right direction. Another interesting article is located at  http://www.krysstal.com/langfams.html. It deals with language families and mentions the Rotokas language - Rotokas is spoken in Papua New Guinea on the Island of Bougainville by approximately 4,300 people and it has the fewest sounds of any language, 11 (compared to the 44 or so of standard English). These 11 are made up of five vowels and six consonants: A, E, I, O, U, B, G, K, P, R, T. - can you imagine that - a language with only 11 sounds. Six of those are used in the name of the language.

It has been reported that PNG has one language for every 900 square kilometres. of the country or roughly one language for every 350 square miles for those readers who do not use the metric system.

[Those Revolutionists who have not yet seen the video "The Coconut Revolution" about Bougainvile should try to. There is a web address for the distributor:  http://www.cultureshop.org . Persons interested in supporting Bows and arrows against the guns of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund might see  http://www.eco-action.org/ssp for the video "Freedom for West Papua", The indigenous resitance to the UN decision to hand pagan and protestant populations over to Moslem Indonesia for genocide. - so the Capitalist world could thieve their resources.]