Australian High Commission
Papua New Guinea

Long-time plant pathologist turns her hand to helping farming families

Dr Josephine Saul Maora truly has had the best of both worlds.

Originally from Yabob in Madang Province, Dr Saul Maora’s story is about change. A transition from three decades of research into plant diseases, to working in communities helping farming families improve their livelihoods. 

Her story also parallels with Australian supported agricultural research that is working to address some of the gender equity challenges Papua New Guinea continues to face.

Dr Saul Maora recalls her childhood: “I wanted to do forestry in Bulolo, but when I was completing my secondary school, they were not accepting women.”

In high school her passion for the sciences again re-emerged.

“I saw microorganisms through a microscope, and it was exciting. To see these little things that the naked eye couldn’t see!”

Dr Saul Maora went on to University where she majored in Biology, specifically, crop protection.

At the end of her studies, in 1984, she began work with the Cocoa Industry Company Ltd, the Cocoa Board’s research arm. This would become the start of a long career, honing her skills as a plant health specialist.

She worked on a number of projects, supported by the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR), Australia’s specialist agricultural research for development agency.

“All my training has been in agriculture. I know a lot about cocoa and coconuts. I spent about three decades doing that and most of it was in ACIAR projects,” says Dr Saul Maora.

Dr Saul worked alongside other PNG and Australian scientists to combat the devastating Bogia coconut syndrome and improving cocoa production following the incursion of cocoa pod borer.

In 2016, Dr Saul Maora became a part of an exciting new ACIAR program, one jointly funded by the PNG-Australia Partnership.

The Transformative Agriculture and Enterprise Development Program (TADEP), is helping rural communities, especially women and girls, transition from subsistence to market-oriented production. The program works to strengthen private sector led development and improve agriculture quality and productivity.

Dr Saul Maora was the plant pathologist for two TADEP projects, ‘Developing the Bougainville cocoa value chain and the PNG Cocoa Project. Both projects aim to improve cocoa production and quality in PNG.

During her time there, she recalls an incident while on a project site visit - one that would mark a turning point in her career.

“I went with a technical team working on the cocoa pod borer to a remote village. Out of the blue, I asked the farmers, why are you growing cocoa? And they couldn’t answer me… After a long pause, someone said it was to buy rice and tinned fish.”

Dr Saul Maora was struck by the answer. She says having worked with a number farmers over the years, selling cocoa was not only about accessing immediate needs. She says for some farmers, there are longer term goals like building permanent houses, school feels or to purchase a vehicle.

According to Dr Saul Maora, the experience sparked a growing desire to help farmers in a way that was very different to the scientific work she had been doing on cocoa and coconut diseases in PNG.

She soon became involved in another TADEP project, but this time, one that worked directly with rural farmers and targeted the roles of family members and what each contributed to the family.

Dr Saul Maora began working with adult learning specialist, Professor Barbara Pamphilon from the University of Canberra. Professor Pamphilon led a project that aimed to improve economic development for women small holders in rural PNG.

This project recognises that women farmers are key to livelihoods of PNG families. They produce essential subsistence crops and generate income from surplus. But at the same time, they are faced with challenges like unequal distribution of labour and low levels of schooling.

Professor Pamphilon says the early research looked at how to improve the involvement of PNG women in smallholder farming training. But this approach would not work.

“It became very clear, very quickly that it wasn’t appropriate to train women only. Really, in PNG like most of the Pacific, it is the family that is a unit. We changed our research question, to look at how can we help the whole family, to be more effective in their farming and make it equitable for all family members, from older people, to women and to youth,” says Professor Pamphilon.

The new training model, became known as the Family Farm Teams (FFT) training.

Armed with training from Professor Pamphilon, Dr Saul Maora along with other project members took to the field, to conduct FFT training for rural farming families.

There are four modules in FFT training. They are goal setting, planning your farm, food and nutrition and communication and decision making.

“You have the goals first and this should not be a decision set by one member of the family. It is the whole family who should sit down and talk about these goals and what they want to achieve in life. Cocoa then becomes their economic venture to get the money to achieve their goals,” Dr Saul Maora says.

She says in the second module, farmers are given training on planning to achieve these goals. This involves the family mapping out their garden plots, identifying what agricultural activities to undertake and any other factors they need to consider achieving their goals.

Dr Saul Maora says the third module, on food, teaches families about the importance of nutritious eating, to ensure all members of the family are healthy and able, while the communication module deals with shared decision making in the family, anger management and financial literacy.

As part of the training, one of the activities that the family members do, relates to unpacking some of the gender roles in PNG communities. Dr Saul says this exercise really stands out for her.

She says family members are able to see exactly how much they contribute to the family’s wellbeing.

“One of the things we do is we make them write what they do from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep. And through this, they themselves will see exactly what each of their roles have been within the family,” Dr Saul says.

“Through this we are changing their mindsets and trying to equally distribute things like household chores.”

Professor Pamphilon says the model worked so well that it was also trialled in other parts of the country. “We worked in five different provinces. We looked at a cocoa and coffee, we looked at vegetables and we looked at coconuts. We looked at the range of crops to see if the Family Farm Teams approach helped the farmers, and it did,” she says.

The FFT training uses a peer educator approach and the families that receive the training become village community educators. “These are people who we worked with in the village who can then train others, including other family members, their church network or neighbours,” says Professor Pamphilon.

 The FFT training is currently being rolled out in other ACIAR supported projects in PNG. Dr Saul runs training across the two cocoa projects in PNG and Bougainville, under the TADEP program.

The FFT training is also being trialled in Solomon Islands, as part of another ACIAR supported project, to support women farmers and their families.

It is work that Dr Saul Maora both believes in and enjoys. “It is actually all about the family and about going back to the basics,” she says.

Dr Saul Maora has a master’s degree from La Trobe University and a PhD from the University of Sydney.

For further information, including access to related materials, please contact the Australian High Commission media team: +675 7090 0100