The AusAID and Australian Defence Force (ADF) relief program provided food to more than 100,000 people in areas accessible only by air (Sudradjat 2001, 219). But the assessment teams estimated that 260,000 people had no food available and 980,000 had severely restricted amounts of food available from gardens. That implies that around 160,000 people who had no food and 980,000 who had insufficient food were left to be assisted by the Papua New Guinea government relief program. We know that Papua New Guinea government responses were inadequate to say the least. The Papua New Guinea national government purchased around 23,500 tonnes of rice for relief in 1997/98 (compared to around 9400 tonnes purchased by AusAID and 7000 tonnes purchased by individual provincial governments) but much of this food was delivered after the most critical period in December 1997 had passed (see, for example, Jonathon 2001, 212–213). How did these people survive?

First, they ate ‘famine foods’, either foods that are not eaten often, or that are only eaten in times of hunger. Secondly, in rural areas people raised small amounts of cash by killing and selling pigs, cooking and selling pork and vegetables, buying packets of cigarettes and selling them individually, and by selling artifacts. With the cash earned they purchased imported rice and flour. Thirdly, they moved to areas where food was available. A customary coping mechanism in frost-affected areas is to move to lower altitude valleys to stay with relatives. It was estimated that up to 75 per cent of people moved out of the Kandep and Marient basins during 1997 and walked over mountain passes into the Tsaka and Lai valleys. The problem with this response in 1997 was that the drought was so widespread and severe that food in these areas was also critically short. Many people moved further to stay with relatives in towns. For example, an estimated 20–25 per cent of the population from villages at Elimbari in Simbu migrated to Goroka, Lae and Port Moresby (Bourke 2000, 163). Anecdotal reports suggest that many public servants had standing room only in their houses at night and spent all of their salaries and savings on buying food. Fourthly, people employed in urban areas or at mines either sent money to their rural relatives or purchased rice and sent it home.

The overall outcome of these responses and the relief program was a 65,917 tonne or 38 per cent increase in the sales of rice in Papua New Guinea during 1997–98. The important point is that over 80 per cent (54,000 tonnes) of the additional rice was purchased through retail outlets (Bourke 2000, 160; Whitecross and Franklin 2001).This is the rice purchased by people who had sold their collection of empty bottles, or killed their pigs, or cooked vegetable stews, or sold cigarettes. It is the rice that people bought for their relatives visiting the towns and which people sent into the countryside to their home villages. It should be noted that Rice Industries, the importer of almost all rice into Papua New Guinea did not increase prices during 1997, despite the severe drop in the value of the kina (Whitecross and Franklin 2001).

So, although due credit must go to AusAID and the ADF for delivering food to inaccessible areas, credit must also go to the citizens of Papua New Guinea for feeding themselves or feeding their relatives, from their own resources, for around four to six months in 1997–98. They ‘drew upon the “on-going and everyday”. Their obligations to kin, their long-standing exchange relationships and a truly amazing ability to withstand suffering and hardship, saw them through’ (Allen 2000, 120).

But an unknown number of children and older people died in 1997, directly or indirectly as a result of the food shortages. They died quietly, without fuss, out of sight of the glare of the international media, in out-of-the-way places. An AusAID-funded review of the relief program criticized the assessments of October and November/December 1997 on the grounds that they under-estimated the ability of people to cope using their own resources (Lea et al. 1999). On the evidence of the increased rice and flour sales in 1997–98, this is possibly true for the more accessible areas. The assessments certainly did not foresee the remarkable response of the Papua New Guinea citizenry in the feeding of their rural kith and kin. But other evidence that came to hand during 1997 strongly suggests that in isolated places death rates increased significantly (Dwyer and Minnegal 2000; Haley 2001; Lemonnier 2001; Robinson 2001).