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DEVELOPMENT: Small Islands Face Greater Dangers Than Rogue Waves

Dionne Jackson Miller

KINGSTON, Jan 7 2005 (IPS) - Even as island states take a hard look at their disaster response plans in the wake of the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunamis, officials in the Caribbean say that their economic development and environmental needs are even more pressing.

“We need to decide where to put coastal development, not just for tsunamis, but for the much more frequent threat of storm surges and anticipated sea level rise (from global warming),” said Barbara Carby, head of Jamaica’s Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management.

Disaster management is but one of 14 broad themes – most focused on sound environmental stewardship – that emerged from a landmark conference of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Barbados in 1994.

It is now a decade since that first meeting, and the international community is preparing to review its progress next week at a conference in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius – progress that the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) says has been patchy.

Byron Blake, CARICOM’s assistant secretary general, said that even 10 years ago, there was awareness that the agenda was incomplete.

“The Barbados meeting focused largely on environmental concerns because that is what we saw then as the big, big, urgent challenge,” he told IPS. “What has emerged since is that…you also have a situation in which the economic vulnerability of these countries has also moved to the fore, and this has come about largely because of international policies relating to trade.”

“A lot of these small countries produce and export mainly agricultural commodities, and the terms of trade for those products have been systematically going down,” Blake said.

“As you get the world moving to what they call free trade and competitive trade, so economic vulnerability has come to become a very significant problem that has to be addressed now in that Mauritius meeting in a way that it was not centrally addressed in the Barbados meeting.”

There are also urgent social problems, like transnational crime, security, HIV/AIDS and other communicable diseases that must be taken up, he said.

But even given the relatively limited scope of the 1994 programme of action, progress on the SIDS agenda has been mixed, says Blake. For example, the Caribbean has not put in place a central unit to monitor implementation of the Barbados programme of action.

“We have seen the need for a coordinating mechanism in the region and there is a start where climate change is concerned, with the establishment of the Caribbean Community climate change centre in Belize,” said Leonie Barnaby, senior director of the environment management division in Jamaica’s Ministry of Land and Environment.

On the issues of climate change and sea level rise, officials agree that the region did make progress, with the establishment of the regional climate change centre, significant data gathering and coordination of the work of regional scientists.

There has also been an improvement in disaster preparedness and management, with the strengthening of the Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Response Agency. Still, a United Nations Environment Programme review prepared for the Mauritius meeting says it is “crucial” that the Caribbean continues to strengthen regional networks for disaster preparedness, including emergency relief funds, hazard mapping, and early warning and emergency response systems.

The importance of improved capacity for disaster management was starkly demonstrated during the last hurricane season, when Hurricane Ivan devastated the tiny island of Grenada, and also severely damaged several communities in Jamaica. The same hurricane season brought Tropical Storm Jeanne, which ravaged Haiti.

Outside of the region, the Indian Ocean tsunami dramatically brought home the potential dangers faced by residents of coastal zone communities, especially those on small islands.

Carby is concerned that while there has been a lot of talk about disaster management and the vulnerability of small island states since the Barbados conference, she has not seen the necessary action to back that up, including serious attention paid to coastal zone development.

“The awareness (of the dangers) is greater, (but) there’s been a lot more dialogue than anything else,” she said.

Environmentalist Peter Espeut agrees that little more than lip service has often been given to sustainable development.

“I don’t think our government is really committed to the Barbados programme of action – it’s too expensive,” said Espeut, who runs a non-profit environmental group in Jamaica. “We’re committed to short-term economic development, which is not necessarily sustainable, and if sustainability will get in the way, we’ll park (the concept of sustainability).”

While ecological concerns will likely be closely scrutinised at the Mauritius meeting, as far as CARICOM is concerned, there are some very definite priorities.

“Whatever official document comes out needs to recognise the multidimensional nature of the vulnerabilities or the challenges which these small islands face,” said Blake, acknowledging that this is likely to be difficult.

“It is not easy to get some of the major countries to recognise that, and even where they recognise it they don’t want to accept it because you’re going to need much more resources if you’re going to attack those problems in a meaningful manner,” he said. “Some of the international policies which we have been pursuing over the last 15 or so years will need to be changed.”

An example, he says, is the reluctance of the world’s richest countries to factor the special vulnerabilities of small island nations into trade negotiations.

“They’ve reached the stage in the world where they’re saying, ‘no, we don’t want to have any new categories of states’,” Blake said. “They accept that there is a special case for least developed countries, and in the Caribbean the only country that falls into that category is Haiti. The evidence is suggesting that (this attitude) is crazy, but how do you get acceptance of that?”