Papua New Guinea: Text summaries: Volume 1

Abstract

The major purpose of the Papua New Guinea Agricultural Systems Project was to produce information on smallholder agriculture at provincial and national levels. Information was collected by field observation, interviews with villagers and reference to published and unpublished documents. The information was entered into a computer database (FoxPro ), from where it was transferred to a mapping program (ARC/INFO) (Bourke et al., 1993; Allen et al., 1995a; 1995b). The agricultural systems for all of Papua New Guinea have now been mapped and described. For all of Papua New Guinea, 342 agricultural systems were identified. However, 55 of these are identical to an adjacent system across a provincial border (Table 2). These arose where the land use crossed a provincial border and a new system number was created. Thus there are 287 discrete agricultural systems in Papua New Guinea, as defined by this project. The information has been presented in a series of monographs, titled "Working Papers", one per province. A listing of working papers produced so far is given on the back cover. Show more