We had flown for several hours west of
Hawaii, on a Continental airlines flight, over the vast Pacific Ocean,
and were now descending to the main Marshalls atoll island where I was
to serve for 15 months. As the aircraft got lower, I looked in vain out
of the window for a sight of land below. Finally the plane swung round
and I could see what looked like a strip of beach in the middle of an
empty sea. “Surely we are not going to be landing on that”, I
thought. But we were. The flight touched down at the end of a C-shaped
coral atoll that was about 26 miles long and a mere 100 to 300 yards
wide at most. The highest parts of the island were only 2 or 3 metres
above sea level. Majuro was typical of the thousands of coral isles that
are scattered over the South Pacific, - little pearl necklaces of human
habitation, ornamented with coconut palms and houses made of assorted
materials, - timber, fibre board, coral, palm leaves, bricks, or
pre-cast concrete. White breakers kept up an endless pounding of the
reefs on the windward side of the atoll, while inside its shallow
saucer, all was calm and protected from the deep ocean swells.
Atoll island groups make up most of
Micronesia, the Marshalls, Kiribati (the former Gilbert and Ellice
Islands), and the atoll groups to the south. The other kind of island in
the Pacific, is the volcanic one, with a central cone, all that is left
of a once active volcano. These are found in the Hawaian or Sandwich
Isle group, and form the main islands of Tahiti, Tonga, and Raratonga,
the capital isle of the Cooks. Pitcairn, where the bounty mutineers
settled with their Tahitian wives, is a lonely rock of an island to the
south, with no coral atoll around it. The larger Pacific islands are
found from Fiji west and south to the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia,
and Papua New Guinea, then north to Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Japan. I was to visit and work in most of the Pacific Island groups, and
to get a flavour of life in those outcrops of coral that peeped over the
surface of the ocean, as they rested on subterranean mountains that had
risen from the sea-bed in ages past when the earth and its oceans were
being formed. The Hollywood movie, South Pacific, was filmed
around West Samoa, where Aggie Grey was reputed to have been Michener’s
model for ‘bloody Mary’, but Aggie was beautiful and respectable,
unlike the somewhat tawdry character in the book and the film. I met her
daughter at their hotel in Apia, Aggie having died a few years before my
visit.
Robert Louis Stevenson who attended the
wedding of Aggie Grey’s parents, described the first impression made on
him by the Pacific islands in his book, In the
South Seas :
The first experience
can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first
South Sea island, are memories apart, and touch a virginity of sense. …
Ua-huna appeared upon the starboard bow. Nuka-hiva was whelmed in cloud.
The needles of Ua-pu stood there on the horizon, in the sparkling
brightness of the morning, the first signboard of a world of wonders. …
On our port beam we heard the explosions
of the surf. A few birds flew fishing under the prow. The Casco skimmed
under cliffs, opened out a cove, and began to slide into the bay of
Anaho. The cocoa (coconut) palm that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful,
… was seen crowding the beach and fringing the sides of the mountains.
The scent of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us.
We spied a native
village standing close upon a curve of beach, under a grove of palms.
The sea in front growled and whitened on a concave arc of reef. The
cocoa tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the
surf. “The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,” says
the sad Tahitian proverb. But they are, all three, so long as they
endure, co-haunters of the beach.
My acquaintance with islands had begun in
Scotland where we often fished around, and sheltered in, the harbours of
the Orkneys and Shetland, and the inner and outer Hebridean islands. As
a family we visited the romantic and historical isles of Skye, and Mull,
and Iona, as well as Arran in the Firth of Clyde. On my father’s boat we
often over-nighted in Kilronan, in the Aran Islands which face the
Atlantic from the western end of Galway Bay in Ireland.
Later I was to serve on some big islands
like Newfoundland, and on each of the larger isles of the Indonesian,
Philippine, and Papua New Guinea archipelagos. I served twice in
Iceland, twice in Hawaii, four times in Sri Lanka, (including a visit to
the Maldives), and once each in the Canary Isles and Cape Verde islands
off West Africa. All of those islands have fascinating maritime
histories, and strong fishery, trade, and cultural connections with the
sea.
Each island has something to say to the
world, for truthfully our whole planet earth is but a tiny spherical
island drifting around the vast sea of space, on the tides of
gravitational pull and the solar winds that emanate from the sun and the
stars. As one of the Apollo astronauts remarked of the sight of the
colourful orb of earth in the blackness of space, - “I could not get
over how incredibly small and fragile it seemed”. Islands, by their
nature, have to be self-sufficient as far as possible, and have to
protect and nurture their natural resources, living and non-living.
Their populations have to survive and organise their towns and
industries, on the basis of the carrying capacity of their soil, water,
and sea.
This applies to urbanised islands also, -
like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, each of which I have worked in.
Until quite recently Hong Kong was self-sufficient in agricultural
produce. Singapore has leased farm land on nearby Indonesian island of
Batam to augment its own production. Each of those densely populated
island states go to great lengths to preserve and enhance their natural
environment. Japan’s islands are larger, but for most of its post-war
years it followed a policy of self-sufficiency in rice, (despite the
high cost it led to), because of the importance of food security.
Japanese towns and villages are impressively neat and tidy, with
seemingly every spare inch of ground used and cared for in ways that
enhance beauty and environmental health.
It has been well said that ‘islands reflect
on a manageable level what the whole planet has to face, - limits to its
resources, and to the growth of its industries and urban areas’.
Islander’s solutions and responses to the limits nature has imposed on
them, illustrate for us how the larger mainland countries might address
the same issues. The patterns of development, and specific approaches
chosen by island communities, are often scalable and can therefore be
applied on a larger or wider scale in bigger states. In that respect,
‘small’ is not only beautiful, - it is often wise and prophetic,
illustrating at micro-levels, a way forward for larger societies.
My own observations have indicated that
scaling up is much easier than scaling down. Large companies and
corporations have great difficulty making or doing things on a small
scale. We can take for example the failure of the U.S. automobile
industry to produce a compact, fuel-efficient car. Japan led the way in
that, and to a lesser extent the smaller British companies (when Britain
actually had an automobile industry). And now, Indian companies are
doing it.
The US space programme has led to a host of
technical innovations, but when it was given contracts to produce
simpler utility items, it generally failed despite the investment of
huge sums of money. There is an old joke about the millions of dollars
spent by NASA to invent a pen that would write in the weightless
atmosphere of a spaceship or space station in orbit. Normal ball point
pens would not function there. The Russians in contrast, having less
money, were more pragmatic, and decided to use pencils !
In my own field of fisheries, there are many
cases of small boat-builders progressing to construct bigger boats, -
but the reverse rarely happens. In the 1960’s and 70’s the Ross Group,
Britain’s largest deep sea trawling company, tried to produce a new
generation of pocket trawlers designed for low cost and for fishing on
grounds closer to the UK. The attempt failed. But at the same time, the
yards that were producing wooden boats of 50 or 60 feet in length,
adapted easily to the design and construction of 70 and 80 foot vessels.
Large organisations similarly struggle to
operate on a small scale. This is the reason that all over the world the
bigger aid agencies are sub-contracting more and more of their field
work to small NGOs which are located on the ground, understand the local
conditions, and can provide services at relatively low cost. The World
Bank functions best when it finances and manages very large capital
investment projects, like those involving construction of new roads,
ports, cement plants, dams, and bridges. But when it tries to invest in
improvements to thousands of small farms, small fishing fleets, or rural
small scale industry, - it fails miserably. So it generally leaves those
sectors to the Asian Development Bank, or to FAO, or to bilateral aid
organisations. Even the UN Agencies, which I know well, are hamstrung as
a result of their size and the mountain of internal regulations
developed over the past 50 years. The bigger the organisation, the more
likely it is that officers will avoid making decisions, and will tend to
‘pass the buck’ to other bureaucrats. The more regulations an agency
has, and the longer the period over which they were compiled, the
likelihood increases that many of them will be simply irrelevant or
quite unhelpful. I could recite umpteen anecdotes and detail many
incidents where good projects have been delayed, undermined, or
thoroughly frustrated by a rigid application of these out-dated rules.
But I will refrain from embarrassing the agencies concerned, since for
the most part they genuinely try to facilitate beneficial development.
Not all small island communities make wise
decisions, - especially if they are part of a huge state, or are under
the control or influence of powerful global corporations. In fisheries,
huge mistakes were made by Newfoundland and Iceland when their
governments (ignoring fishermen protests), sold out to big business,
encouraged the building of super-trawlers, instituted ITQ systems for
trading fishing rights and fish quotas, and in a few short years saw
their fish resources decimated, and their smaller coastal communities
robbed of jobs and income. These mistakes may take many years to
rectify.
In contrast, the Faeroe Isles, which has a
tiny population, and a relatively large Fishery EEZ, well stocked with
cod, haddock, and herring, has shown how these resources can be well
managed and sustainably harvested. Although not a member of the European
Union, it voluntarily complied with EC CFP (common fishery policy)
recommendations on fish stocks, mostly expressed in ICES advice on
fishing effort and quotas. ICES is the International Council for the
Exploration of the Sea, and is based in Denmark. While not officially a
part of the EC Fisheries Directorate in Brussels, it has followed EC
policies and directives in what some would describe as a slavish and
unquestioning way. The application of EC and ICES advice to the fishing
fleets of EU member states, produced increasingly negative results year
after year during the 1980’s and 1990’s (and continues so till now).
Every year the advice was to cut both fleet size and fish quotas, or
total allowable catches. Along with the member states, the Faeroe Isles
conformed, but the fish stock news continued to be bad. Finally, in
1992, ICES wanted to call a halt to all cod fishing.
The Faeroes government and fishermen had had
enough. It was announced that they would no longer follow EC or ICES
guidelines, but would take independent professional advice. Later they
said if they had followed ICES advice, the country would have become
bankrupt in a few short years. So they called on an Icelandic marine
fisheries biologist Jon Kristjonsson, and together with their own
scientists and fishers, re-examined the whole situation. They found that
ICES had over-estimated the fishing mortality, and under-estimated
natural fish mortality and predation on young fish. Kristjonsson
concluded that the measures imposed under the CFP and ICES, (discarding,
and managing by quota allocations rather than effort control), were
actually increasing fish mortality, and that a totally new approach was
needed.
Faeroes Fisheries Minister Jorgen Niclasen
said that the country had to distance itself from the EU’s blind faith
in ITQs (individual tradeable quotas), as a management tool. His
scientists agreed with Kristjonsson that the EU / EC perception that
increased spawning stock meant increased recruitment, was flawed.
Instead they concluded that the large spawning stock was actually
freezing out recruitment, and for evidence of that, could point to the
ceiling to natural stock growth during the war when fishing was mostly
suspended.
So in 1993 little Faeroe Isles went its own
way. It abandoned the discredited EU quota management system, and its
enforced discarding of excess catches, and put the whole of its fleet on
an effort basis (number and size of boats, and days at sea). All fish
caught had to be landed and no fish discarded at sea. Where the EC and
ICES had called for cuts of 25% in fishing effort and quotas, the
Faeroes cut effort by only 1% and 2% in 2001 and 2002. Over the next ten
years the Faeroese fish stock recovered and continued to grow. Catches
increased in a sustainable way, and the fishery sector recovered its
economic health and prosperity. Deputy Prime Minister Hogin Hoydal
called for an OPEC style association of non-EU fishing states like
Faeroes, Iceland, Norway and Greenland, to cooperate on stock management
in a manner based on sound biology.
The small islands of the Pacific showed
similar wisdom and good management, after a period of international
pressure to permit fleets of tuna purse seiners to operate within their
EEZ fishing zones. At first the governments reckoned that the fees from
these fishing permits would be useful foreign income, but as the tuna
stocks declined and fishing pressure increased, it became apparent that
the corporate tuna fleets had created excessive effort on the schools of
ocean-swimming tunas. So with the backing of the South Pacific
Commission and the Fisheries Forum, and the support of U.N. and regional
bodies, the foreign tuna fishing licenses were drastically curtailed.
These island states also placed strict
controls on the export of wild aquarium fish harvested from around their
coral reefs. Deep water line fishing for snapper, grouper, jewfish, and
other breams and sharks that are found around the larger islands at
depths of over 100 fathoms, was on the increase, and was made subject to
controls to protect both the fish and the corals.
Instead of seeking to imitate the big
fishing countries, the Pacific states sought out high value niche
markets which they could access with relatively small volumes of fish
and fruit produce. Together with FAO and UNIDO officers, I was involved
in these efforts in cooperation with fishery and agriculture directors
in each South Pacific state. Several of the directors I had worked with
in the past. Tom Marsters was a tall handsome
Polynesian who had boxed and played rugby as a student, and later
excelled in golf. He was one of a class of fishery officers I taught in
UK in 1972. When I arrived in Raratonga, Tom and Tuene his wife were at
the airport to meet me, and garland me with flowers in a typical Pacific
welcome. He was an example of many professional officers in that
part of the world who sought to maximise the local benefits of the
islands’ resources, while protecting them from foreign exploitation.
The Cook Islands were for me, the most
beautiful and most pristine part of the Pacific. This remote group of
islands spread over thousands of miles of ocean, is populated by
handsome Polynesians who are related by language and kinship to the
Maoris of New Zealand, but who regret the way Maori culture has been
corrupted through its interface with negative aspects of life in New
Zealand’s urban society where there is a high level of unemployment,
alcoholism and social misbehaviour. In contrast, the Cook Islands
communities are well organized, hard working, disciplined, and
respectful to elders and traditions. One of the national practices is to
say grace at every meal. There are also prayers and thanks offered by
government officials before and after air flights and sea travel. I have
been in a restaurant in the Aitutaki atoll where the waiter, assuming
that we as foreigners did not know what was expected of us, came across
and respectfully said grace at our table. Perhaps one reason Cook
Islanders have avoided the failings of New Zealand’s Maoris, is that
they have been relatively isolated from western social influences !
Sometimes the interaction between cultures within a single country, has
a malign effect on the weaker and poorer or disadvantaged groups.
Examples of this would be seen in black ghettos and Indian reservations
in America, and in communities of Slavs in Germany or Austria, and Arabs
in the south of France.
Land ownership throughout the South Pacific,
is a sensitive issue. Despite much pressure from development banks and
western economists, small Pacific states refuse to permit open sale of
land, and in particular, sale to foreigners. For the most part, land can
be leased for periods of up to 99 years, but not sold.
Traditionally-owned land is dealt with under inheritance laws for
families. Sometimes, with relatives living far way in Australia or
Hawaii or California, it can take a long time to settle a land ownership
or inheritance matter. But the Polynesians and most of the Micronesians
prefer it that way. These arrangements protect the island communities
from land speculation and from accumulation of unearned income from real
estate that is a hallmark of our western economic systems. Land reform
therefore is not a pressing need in the ocean islands. But it is
certainly overdue in UK, Europe, and the USA.
The Island communities are as attractive as
the people. You can drive around Raratonga or any of the atolls, and you
will see no litter or rubbish. Roads, gardens and beaches are well
maintained and free of pollution. The crystal waters and corals of the
coastal areas have no plastic bags, oil slicks or debris. The whole
country is a picture of what most people imagine when they think of the
South Pacific. As in most small Pacific states, the resources are
scattered and industries are small scale. The islands have albacore tuna
and there are black pearl oysters in the north. Reef fish abound, and
there is ample fruit grown to supply the tourist trade and some niche
export markets. Banana, pawpaw, coconut, pineapple, orange and
breadfruit are grown. As in other parts of the Pacific there are taro
tubers and sweet potato. An inspiring experience for me in the Cooks,
was to stand on the beach at Raratonga, any hour of the day or night,
and listed to the roar of the ocean seas pounding the reef offshore. The
Victoria Falls in Africa was called “the smoke that thunders” by local
natives in Livingstone’s time. The roar of the surf striking the reefs
at Raratonga is even louder.
The much abused island of planet earth could
take a few lessons from the islands of the Cook archipelago. We have a
long way to go to reduce and halt pollution and wasteful consumption of
our irreplaceable mineral wealth, and our fragile living resources. But
both planet and its inhabitants would be healthier, safer, and enjoy
more economic justice and opportunity, if we applied small island
concepts to its care and its management. Encouragingly there has been a
global trend towards decentralisation and devolvement of power from
national capitals and centres to regional or provincial, and even
district centres which are closer to the people. But at the same time
there has been strong resistance as neither politicians nor civil
servants like to relinquish power. |