Hamon Matipe,center, a tribal chief, squandered $120,000 given to him from ExxonMobil for land in his village

ExxonMobil is a mixed blessing for poor tribes.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

TARI, PAPUA NEW GUINEA A FOUNDING MYTH IN the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea is said to have foretold the arrival of ExxonMobil, the American oil giant that is preparing to extract natural gas here and ship it overseas.

According to the myth, called Gigira Laitebo, an underground fire is kept alive by inhabitants poking sticks into the earth. Eventually, the fire “will light up the world,” said Peter O’Neill, the national government’s finance minister. “By development of the project and delivering to international markets, it’s one way of fulfilling the myth.” But like all myths, this one is open to interpretation, as a group of men and women at a Roman Catholic parish here suggested before Sunday Mass recently.

“If foreigners come to our land, you give them food and water, but don’t give them the fire,” said John Hamule, 38 . “If you do, it will destroy this place.” In 2014, ExxonMobil is scheduled to start shipping natural gas through a 720-kilometer pipeline, then on to Japan, China and other markets in East Asia. But the flood of revenue, which is expected to bring Papua New Guinea $30 billion over three decades , will force a country already beset by state corruption and bedeviled by a complex land tenure system to grapple with the kind of windfall that has paradoxically entrenched other poor, resource-rich nations in deeper poverty.

ExxonMobil is spending $15 billion in an undeveloped region of Papua New Guinea. A man in Tari salvaged a tree.

Wealth and Worry for Tribes

While the West’s richest companies are used to seeking natural resources in the world’s poorest corners, few places on earth seem as ill prepared as the Southern Highlands to deal with ExxonMobil. The most impoverished region in one of the world’s poorest countries, it went unexplored by Westerners until the 1930s.

Constant tribal wars over land, women and pigs - the last being prized measures of wealth, used to pay for dowries and settle disputes - have grown deadlier in the past decade with the easy availability of high-powered rifles smuggled in from Indonesia, just to the west, which are exchanged for the marijuana grown here.

But local leaders worry about the continuing inflow of guns into an area with almost no government presence . They worry that the benefits of the gas project will fall short of expectations, begetting a generation of young men who will train their anger on Exxon- Mobil. Already, in fact, angry landowners have forced ExxonMobil’s contractors to suspend work temporarily at several construction sites, and local businessmen bid for contracts with unconcealed threats.

“Any outside waste management company that is given the contract will not be allowed into Komo by force or whatever means,” said Robin Tuna, 34, whose company was bidding for just such a contract in Komo . And ExxonMobil faces the daunting prospect of dealing with Papua New Guinea’s distinctive form of land tenure, which grants control over 97 percent of the land to customary landowners, primarily indigenous people whose ownership rights to small plots are inherited. More than 60,000 people own land where gas will be either extracted or transported.

To get their agreement, the government invited 3,000 to a meeting last year to settle benefit-sharing agreements. The government intentionally held the conference on an island to ward off the gate crashers, though 2,000 uninvited landowners eventually flew over, said Anderson Agiru, the governor of Southern Highlands Province. The meeting, scheduled for seven days, lasted six weeks. Officials at ExxonMobil declined to be interviewed .

The picture here in the Southern Highlands is not completely bleak. With the start of several ExxonMobilrelated construction projects in recent months, for instance, the police have returned after a long absence. Here in Tari - the largest town closest to the gas fields ? a tribal war has given way to new businesses.

“No one from the outside dared to come to Tari two years ago,” said Peter Muli, 37, whose chicken restaurant, House-Kai, is now thriving. With gas exports a few years off, little money is flowing to the people here. But it has begun to worry the priests at the Catholic parish. “The people here are not ready for that kind of money,” said the Reverend Paul Patlo, a Papua New Guinean.

Earlier, he had held up a warning to his congregation: a local village chief who had squandered $120,000 . Hamon Matipe, the septuagenarian chief of Kili, said he had given most of the money to his 10 wives. But he had used about $20,000 to buy 48 pigs, which he used as a dowry to obtain a 15-year-old bride , paying above the going rate of 30 pigs.

He and some 30 village men then celebrated by buying 15 cases of beer, costing about $800. “All the money is now gone,” Mr. Matipe said. “But I’m very happy about the company, ExxonMobil. Before, I had nothing. ”