Learning

from past mistakes

FOR the past five years the United Nations Development Programme has groduced the Human Development eport which has achieved a near miracle in UN terms by making devel opment issues newsworthy, interesting and even controversial. Its stroke of genius was to rank countries in the equivalent of a sports table.

Across the world, news editors and sports fans, whether their sport is rugby, soccer, cricket or baseball, express their enthusiasm in league tables of one kind or another. So this year, for example, Canadians were mortified when they were edged from first position by the Japanese two years ago. This year the Japanese must recover from the loss of face involved by being pushed down to number three position by the come back Canadians, and the Swiss.

Why bother? Because the Human Development Report in its own subtle way is much more than a newsworthy table of rank. The Human Develop ment Index measures countries’ success at improving the life of its people since it takes into account the health and education of a population, as well as their overall wealth. Some nominally rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, have a high Gross Domestic Product per person, but the wealth is badly distrib uted and social services are poor, so their human development lags behind.

For the first four years, the Pacific has been left behind by this process. Apart from a few of the larger nations like PNG and Fiji, UNDP has not compiled statistics for the Pacific. However, this year it produced a separate Pacific Human Development Report which will be discussed by the Forum summit in Australia next month. UNDP con cludes that the “Pacific Island countries ... are still in a position to avoid the path of development that leads to widespread human deprivation which is now the prevalent condition of many developing countries”. In contrast, they say, “the

quality of life and human welfare in the Pacific is enviable in comparison” with many of those countries.

The problems they identify are an “emerging trend of disparities in in comes and in access to resources, economic opportunities and social ser vices between social groups, people in rural and urban areas, central and outer islands, and men and women in the Pacific Island countries”.

Ironically, it suggests that one of the factors which works to the Pacific’s advantage is something that older indicators would have regarded a sign of backwardness. “A large subsistence sector ensuring a high level of subsistence, and which effectively ab sorbs external shocks; strong cultural identity and traditional values, and the stable social fabric based on tbe village community and extended family sys tem.” These have, of course, been the deliberate or inadvertent choice of most of the world’s modernisers.

The report suggests that by building constructively on the past, the Pacific can reach the future without passing the gruesome present of many developing nations.

Specifically looking at the region, most of the Forum members fall into the medium human development category except for the Solomons and PNG whose low literacy and mortality rates pull them into the low human develop ment category. Ironically, Nauru has

one of the lowest life expectations, presumably because of the “diseases of affluence” caused by their forced and rapid progress from their traditional life

styles.

However, the low economic but high population growth of the Pacific is a major threat to future prosperity, which has been to some extent disguised so far by the emigration of workers and the remittances they send home. As the report coyly points out, a change of policy by nations such as New Zealand, Australia and the US could bring the crisis point forward much more quickly.

Already, some problems are being

seen in oasic services like education where pressure on government budgets has often hit primary education. The report instances PNG which already has one of the lowest literacy rates, but is

having problems supplying textbooks

and poor school buildings. In Vanuatu the legacy of its anomalous colonial history is the high cost of maintaining French and English educational sys tems.

Shakespeare once said that compari sons were odious. In this case they are far from it. By comparing the develop ment of the various Pacific Islands with each other, and then with the rest of the world, planners and people can get some ideas of the successes and weaknesses of existing strategies, both

locally, regionally and internationally.

The conclusion drawn from those statistics may differ, but the Pacific Human Development Report offers a chance for the region to avoid many of the mistakes made by other areas. It gives them ammunition to fight off outside developers who try to force inappropriate models on them as the price of aid or finance.

But as the report itself points out, the debate on development is far too important to be left to politicians.

Unless ordinary people involve them selves in it, then serious mistakes will be made. d

As reported in the May issue of PIM there was a successful compromise on the differences between the donor and de veloping nations over the composition of the governing board. However, that left unresolved the question of the distri bution of the developing world’s seats.

Logically, as the countries most at risk because of changes in the global environ ment, the small islands should have had a grouping of their own. But UN custom and practice is for the regional groupings to allocate seats, which means that the bulk of the AOSIS members would be split between the Asia-Pacific and Latin- America-Caribbean groupings, in each of which the islands would be a minority, although together they would be as big as many regional groupings.

However, at the closed meeting in May in Washington, the Caribbean islands defected from that position, and came to an agreement with their Latin American neighbours on a Caribbean seat. That left the SOPAC countries to confront the mainland masses of the Asia Pacific Group which had a total of six “constituencies” on the GEF council.

The case was put eloquently and el egantly on their behalf by Aloysius Tuuth, Federated State of Micronesia’s minister of finance who invoked the just finished Small Islands Conference to back up the fallback claim for one of those Asia Pacific constituencies to go to the 14 small island developing states of the Pacific. Many of the islands he pointed out were participants in the GEF and other UN agencies, even though they had not joined the UN itself. They had common concerns in protecting the Pacific Ocean, both in its own right and as a carbon sink of vital interest to the globe. In law, the Rio Earth Summit and the Barbados declaration called for recognition of the special interests of small islands.

Unfortunately, according to one ob server, Tuuth’s colleagues seem to have felt that since he presented an irrefutable case, they had no need to back it up.

Unfortunately reason and international agreements were of little consequence in the face of power. The islands ended up with half a constituency. They will share a constituency with Indonesia and the Philippines. These two presented them selves as island nations, which of course they are, if hardly small, and will each serve three years alongside whichever nation the Forum islands pick to rep resent them. Half a constituency is of course better than none. But the affair may help to dispel any lingering illusions that the small island states can rely upon the goodwill of their neighbours and other developing nations. □