Seven years have passed since the violence began, but the conflict between the state and the people of Bougainville remains unresolved. Although the events at Bougainville illustrate the physical power of local communities to close down development projects by force, they also reveal the terrible cost of exercising that option. Still, Bougainville has forever changed the playing field for social movements in the Pacific, as developers must now acknowledge that indigenous communities retain veto power over their projects, regardless of promises made by the state. Since 1986, I have worked with the Yonggom people living in the interior lowland rain forests of Papua New Guinea. They combine subsistence strategies of slash and burn horticulture, sago extraction, pig husbandry, and hunting and gathering in their extensive rain forest holdings with participation in the regional cash economy.
Villagers earn money by tapping rubber trees and by selling garden and forest products in town.
In urban areas, Yonggom work in local businesses and construction projects, in the public sector, and for the mine. Most Yonggom prefer life in the village, where they have strong emotional ties to land, kin and community, and where until recently they had greater control over subsistence resources. Since the mine began production, the finely ground material that it releases into the river regularly washes over the river banks into the surrounding low-lying rain forest, killing trees as far as two kilometers away from the river. While fish, prawns and turtles once provided important protein in Yonggom diets, today they are rarely caught. Villagers said that the sago palms growing along the river and the other affected waterways fail to produce the usual starch-bearing pith that is the mainstay of their diets.