Why is resource-rich Papua New Guinea so poor?

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This is the script for my video posted on September 10, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

If you were to look at a breakdown of Papua New Guinea's natural resources, you'd see vast reserves of gold, copper, and natural gas at the top of the list. But PNG faces severe poverty, terrible infrastructure, and human development ranked 154th out of 193 countries. So why isn't Papua New Guinea rich?

Humans first settled in modern PNG about 50000 years ago. The people there independently developed their own form of agriculture, building drainage and cultivation mechanisms to domesticate taro, bananas, and sugarcane, which then spread across the Pacific.

Before the colonial era, there were no state-level polities in PNG. Instead, the people organized around unstable "big men" who competed for followers and prestige inside small, shifting factions, though there were also hereditary chiefly systems in some coastal groups. This directly influences the country's politics today.

But in the late 19th century, the island of New Guinea was split three ways, between the Dutch west, which now serves as the Indonesian Papua provinces, the German northeast, and the British southeast.

In 1906, Britain transferred control of its area to Australia, and after WWI Australia gained control of the former German territory too under a League of Nations mandate.

The island was hugely important during WWII. The war saw Australia and the allies build airstrips and other military infrastructure, expose parts of the island’s interior for the first time, and create a lasting bond between Australia and the indigenous Papuans, who often worked alongside them.

After WWII, Australia retained control of the region as a UN trust territory. It ran Papua to the south and New Guinea in the north with separate administrations until 1949, when it merged them into a single territory. The real push toward independence only came in the 1960s.

PNG came into being as a sovereign state in 1975, and in many ways independence was forced upon it. The state was thin and built on top of a society with no real prior tradition of statehood.

Much of PNG’s modern dynamics can be ultimately attributed to its geography. The country spans some 600 islands, with altitudes ranging from sea level to over 4500m. The central Highlands are treacherous, and the lowlands are mostly swamp. The terrain makes overland transport incredibly difficult.

This is one of the main reasons the country hosts about 840 languages despite having only around 11m people. Over tens of thousands of years, groups have been isolated and have in fact actively made their languages different from their neighbors to mark identity and set tribal boundaries. The country's official languages are English and Tok Pisin, an English-based creole. Tok Pisin is the one that actually holds the country together, with around 4m speakers using it to bridge all those local languages.

But the island’s geography has also prevented infrastructure development. The capital of Port Moresby has no proper highway link to any other major population center, despite decades of consideration.

The Highlands Highway, meanwhile, links the port city of Lae to the Highlands, serving an area home to over 40% of the population. It's nearly 900km long, but it's mostly a two-lane road. Still, the region it feeds produces close to 80% of PNG's export earnings, and when it's cut by a landslide or tribal fighting, the Highlands are cut off completely. Multi-day closures are routine.

This is a huge problem because about 90% of international cargo moves through PNG’s sea ports, and the only alternative for inland communities is aviation. Also, roughly 60% of PNG’s population lives along the coast and waterways, mostly off the road network, so goods only reach them by boat and barge. All of these factors give PNG some of the highest transport costs in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Those resources I mentioned are scattered. Some sit deep in the Highlands, like the gas fields of PNG LNG and the Porgera gold mine. Others are out in the western mountains, down in the Gulf lowlands, or offshore on islands.

But extraction does happen. PNG exported around 14 billion dollars of gas, gold, and copper in 2024. ExxonMobil has led the country's flagship LNG project since 2008 and started shipping gas in 2014. The problem isn’t that the resources can’t be reached at all, but that very little of that money stays in PNG. Tax concessions, weak revenue collection, and projects that run as sealed-off enclaves prevent the country from really benefitting from development. Landowner royalty disputes and enormous upfront costs do make exploitation slower and more contentious, but the truth is that PNG often doesn’t benefit much because gas and the gold still leave the country, preventing it from becoming wealthy.

You might expect that China would attempt to fund PNG to exploit its resources, but China isn't the country’s dominant partner, sitting behind Japan and Australia at about 18.5% of PNG's exports, though on two-way trade it's a close second. And PNG's debt to China is only a small slice of what it owes overall, most of which is either domestic or held by lenders like the World Bank.

In general, China has far less leverage than Australia and the US. Australia signed a new bilateral security agreement in 2023 and established a historic mutual defense alliance in 2025 that just entered force in July 2026. It does not provide for automatic collective defense between the two countries, but it does give Australia in particular substantial influence on PNG’s dynamics.

Australia has also committed over 300m Australian dollars over ten years to stand up PNG's own National Rugby League team from 2028. They established a separate confidential clause that allows Australia to pull the funding if PNG signs a security or policing pact with China, demonstrating how sports diplomacy can actually impact geopolitics.

The US, meanwhile, signed a new Defense Cooperation Agreement with PNG in 2023 that grants the US military unimpeded access to use and develop specific ports and airfields, including Lombrum Naval Base. This provoked protests and sustained domestic criticism, and while development continues, it's slower and lower profile than it likely would have been.

PNG also obviously shares a 820km land border with Indonesia, and refugees have historically spilled over from Indonesia’s counterinsurgency operations in West Papua. PNG recognizes Indonesian sovereignty there and it really can’t afford a broader flood of refugees, so in general it hedges and tries to maintain stability however it can.

Domestically, PNG is pretty complex too. The parliament is full of large and highly fluid coalitions of almost exclusively men across many different parties, though there are many independents too.

This has created a lot of volatility where the Prime Minister needs to constantly buy coalition loyalty, hedge between factions, and change strategy deal by deal, preventing coherent long-term policy from ever really coalescing.

And the political environment is really a mirror on society. The 2024 Enga massacre killed at least 49 people. It started as a revenge attack and ultimately pulled in around 17 tribes, compounding on land disputes and election tensions running back to 2022. Automatic weapons have largely replaced traditional bows and knives, and tribes have increasingly hired mercenaries to fight on their behalf, which has increased the danger of tribal fighting like this.

A month earlier, the Black Wednesday riots happened in Port Moresby, triggered by a payroll issue that cut pay to police and public servants. Police walked off, and looting and arson exploded, provoking a 14-day state of emergency and nearly two dozen deaths. The thing is, PNG has only 5000-6000 sworn police officers for about 11m people, and though there's a plan to roughly double this and get support from Australia and other partners, any incident risks widespread chaos.

This is not a comprehensive view of PNG and its dynamics. The country is really complex, and the thread running through most of it is geography. It doesn’t predestine PNG to a specific fate, but it does compound every weak institution, contested land claim, and thin government service into a situation that’s much harder to fix.

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