Letters

Good coverage

I READ a borrowed copy of the July 1990 issue of Pacific Islands Monthly featuring the environment in the Pacific.

I read it on the plane back to Honolulu from American Samoa and was very impressed by your coverage of the horrendous state of the environment in parts of the Pacific.

I am working on marine conservation video tapes for the Pacific and I must admit my first recent trip there was quite shocking; I walked around in a state of disbelief seeing trash piled so high in the downtown local river that sometimes you can’t even see the water.

Much of this trash, which of course is non-biodegradable aluminium cans, styrofoam and plastic, is then washed out to sea when it rains and wrecks havoc on marine life.

While recycling might be a partial

solution (difficult apparently because of the limited market at this time and, of course, shipping costs) it makes sense to not allow this trash on the islands in the

first place.

Thank you again for your excellent issue. While the reporting of the extent of the problems was depressing it was heartening to see that others are concerned with the possible ruination of these lovely islands and discussion of possible solutions.

Sheila Laffey

Honolulu

Wrong Job

I WAS surprised to read in your Headlines report “Farewell to Bussiek” ( PIM , September 1990) that Wolfgang Holler has taken my job.

You meant to say that Wolfgang is the new Pacbroad coordinator, and I wish him well in helping to develop the radio service of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, I continue to be UNESCO Pacjourn coordinator, helping to develop the print media of the Pacific.

Peter Henshall

Port Moresby

Wrong quotes IN your September 1990 cover story, “A new direction Vanuatu changes course a decade later”, (pp. 18) a paragraph of my own narrative was mistakenly attributed to Grace Molisa, former private secretary to Prime Minister Walter Lini. The paragraph was: “Ever since the missionaries, Westerners have been trying to whiten ni-Vanuatu traditions. And for as long, the ni-Vanuatu have been subverting and adapting Western values to regenerate their own. The missionaries gave us cargo cults. Today the churches try to stamp out sorcercers, traditional healers in town with Europeans as patients, and are breaking ancestor stones as heathen.”

The paragraph was mistakenly enclosed in quotation marks at the typsetting stage. Grace Molisa did not make any similar statements to me during our interview for this cover article.

Earlier in the same issue, a question and answer in the South Pacific Forum cover interview with President leremia Tabai, “The 90s” (pp. 17), were incorrectly matched after several intervening questions and answers were deleted at some stage during production. The relevant questions and answers should have read: Q; There’s a body of opinion in Rim

Governments, development

organisations and among some regional academics that the Pacific nations will never break aid dependency and achieve any real measure of self sufficiency. Do you agree?

A: When I started off in Government I never believed that we would never make it, I read reports saying we are going to depend on aid until the end of the world. We are determined we don’t want to be in a dependent position. We want to be able to live within our means.

In Kiribati we don’t have many resources, just fishersies and tourism. We try to manage our existing resources like the reserve fund. In 1986, we told the UK we don’t want any more budgetary aid. That is an expression of how we’re very keen to be independent.

Kiribati has subsistence and cash economies. We will try to develop the subsistence economy and make it easier.

Affluent subsistence, we call it.

Q; One European diplomat to the

region recently expressed the opinion

that the Pacific nations must allow themselves to become the local stepping stone for Europe’s technological and scientific expansion into the Asian markets, or else suffer the economic

slump of post-independence Africa.

A: I hope he’s wrong. South Pacific countries follow the Western economic model which is vey much into commerce and private enterprise. In Africa, it’s more a socialist model where everything is run by the Government. They have real dictators there. We have more of a chance of success. You have to look at how long it took the developed countries, with resources, to get where they have. How long it took Europe to create the Common Market.

Karen Mangnall

Auckland