DEVELOPMENT-UN: Small Islands Have Day in the Sun

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 1999 (IPS) - Small island states complain their concerns often are overlooked at the United Nations but for two- days this week they have managed to focus attention on their plight rather than the conflicts between major powers.

What leaders learned Monday at the start of a two-day special UN meeting, however, was that little progress has been made on the island states’ key environmental and financial concerns since more than 100 nations met in Barbados in 1994 to agree to tackle those problems jointly.

The Barbados conference resulted in a programme of action designed to forge partnership in dealing with environmental stress, dumping of toxic wastes, economic vulnerability and other key problems of small islands.

But not enough had been done to implement those commitments since then, said the leaders of the small states.

“Overall, it is my government’s view that implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action has been slow,” said President Leo Falcam of Micronesia, one of more than 40 world leaders attending the special meeting.

“For instance, in receipts of official direct assistance (ODA), small island states have experienced significant declines over the past five years,” Falcam added.

According to the United Nations, net disbursements for bilateral and multilateral aid to small islands dropped from 2.36 billion dollars in 1994 to 1.96 billion dollars in 1997.

At the same time, the vulnerability of the small island states had grown, in terms of their economic disadvantages in competing with ever-larger regional blocs and their environmental stress – including rising sea levels.

“Most small islands have only limited resources, whether land, human and financial,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday. “Many lie in the paths of hurricanes and cyclones.”

Annan underscored the particular challenges sparked by globalisation, arguing that “liberalisation and an end to special trade preferences will make it harder for some of the products of small islands to compete.”

That problem had been underlined in the Caribbean, where the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) were concerned that quotas guaranteeing access for Caribbean bananas in European markets would be phased out as a result of a US complaint to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

“The banana battles of recent vintage have been a cruel reality check for the countries of the Caribbean,” argued Billie Miller, deputy prime minister of Barbados.

She contended that the economies of small island states needed “longer and more flexible transitional arrangements to allow them to make the inevitable adjustment to full trade liberalisation.”

Seymour Mullings, deputy prime minister of Jamaica, urged nations to develop a “vulnerability index” to determine how small islands could be affected in their development efforts by changes in the global economy.

In a document reflecting the five-year review of the Barbados Programme, governments here agreed to address the “disadvantages and vulnerabilities of small island developing states in the context of international trade, including market access,” as a result of globalisation.

The document also touched on other key concerns, from the need for ODA to the shipment of radioactive waste, where it called for additional measures to deal with safety within the next two years.

Yet for all the rhetorical commitment to addressing the needs of small islands, there remained the problem that, as Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said, the end result simply would be “words, words, words!”

Kadirgamar argued that some small islands needed urgent assistance in light of the ecological challenges. The Maldives, an island chain in the Indian Ocean, literally was “in great danger of being swallowed up by the ocean.”

“As the most vulnerable group, due to our fragile ecological systems, geographical locations and proneness to natural disasters, we remain the world’s radar for global climate change and sea level rise,” said Kilroy Genia, Attorney General of Papua- New Guinea.

The Papua-New Guinea archipelago, Genia noted, was still battling the effects of a tidal wave last year, twin volcanic eruptions in 1994 and the effects of the ‘El Nino’ and ‘La Nina’ weather patterns.

The two-day meeting appeared headed ultimately for the same discussion of issues raised five years ago in Barbados and some leaders worried that the impetus toward addressing small islands’ concerns has been lost.

UN diplomats hoped, however, that they would get another chance to build on the Barbados process in a high-level review set for 2004.