Pacific Regional Climate Pact Proposed - makes sense

Peter Christoff, www.globalcollabortive.org, argues strongly for PIs to develop a Pacific Regional Climate Pact, having Pacific Islanders (PIs) take control of their own destiny, without delay. Spend 5 minutes reading the following:

http://www.globalcollab.org/Nautilus/australia/apsnet/policy-forum/2007/a-south-seas-carbon-bubble/

Well, as you can imagine, we PIs couldn’t resist commenting on this article, poorly researched and lacking vision. In fact, it offers PIs nothing but hopelessness. And no one will take the initiative and act appropriately. Or will they? Hopefully, GEF-PAS will.

Whilst the European Union may have made considerable economic progress, largely through economic cooperation boosted by appropriate tough enforceable legislation and appropriate education, Australia’s appalling record of cooperation in the Pacific, for example, is sadly not recognized by most.

Likewise, we PIs need stronger regional legislation to help protct ourselves from ourselves.

And Australia continues to play-down its environmental and developmental and cultural abuses, covering a span of over 200 years, internally and regionally throughout the Pacific Region. AusAID could do well to fund Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), learn from it, apply it at home and in the Pacific, collectively.

GEF-PAS could do well to also fund ESD - see next postings.

Show we PIs a curriculum or a Pacific Village Development Operations Manual that we in the Pacific can follow, outlining all the positive steps that we can take in order to attain sustainable development within our villages with our co-called ‘development partners’ or ‘aid partners’.

I aptly refer to them as our ‘raid partners’, raiding our natural resources, our cultural integrities, our future hopes and our small niche lucrative international markets. We PIs need to legislate against such 'raidings' if we are to protect our region's resources, natural and cultural.

This is better explained in the GEF-PAS where, finally, Pacific Islanders (PIs) are taking their destiny into their own hands. We PIs can simply no longer rely on, for example, Australia to be a responsible ‘partner’ in development when it not only limits our development options, but adds to our development burdens.

Take a close moral look at their/our imports and exports, judging for yourself whether they are good for PIs or not (e.g. ‘edible animal fats’ is one example, no longer eaten in Australia/NZ for health reasons, instead exported to Pacific Islanders). Thanks Bro. And the list goes on. Yes, we PIs will continue ‘bubbling along’, too polite to comment on such neo-colonialistic attitudes and practices that are basically environmentally-unfriendly, unethical, culturally-insensitive and ………economically disasterous.

Whilst Christoff argues convincingly, and we admire his moment of forethought, but it comes a little late and it comes with little future hope. The Pacific cannot wait any longer, and the sooner the PIs formulate their own development strategies, with strict regional sanctions in place, the sooner Australians and New Zealanders will need to take a good look at the poverty and hardship being caused by their own international aid policies, in effect, a waste of taxpayers’ money today, and a larger burden to their taxpayers in the future as they hopefully continue to fund this dependency here in the Pacific.

We PIs would do well to act as one group of Micronesians and Polynesians and Melanesians - we're all PIs. Let's unite and have a collective regional policy on whaling, on trans-shipments of nuclear waste, on sustainable development, on logging, on climate change, .......climate change impacts in the Asia/Pacific region are now rapidly becoming the key development issue to be tackled by PIs above all other issues.

And ironically, we PIs are one of the major contributors to climate change with our deforestation, with our coral dynamiting, with our reliance on fossil fuels and trade, with our dependency on tourism and all its carbon emissions.

We PIs need look forward to the post-carbon economy, and look forward to a little more academia and compassion for fellow PIs, and we PIs look forward to seeing a more constructive positive proactive harmonized effort being made by the Australian Government to assist PIs in a more sustainable manner (commencing with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol with strict targets applied).

We PIs plan to improvise sustainability indicators, indicators as simple as signatores to the Kyoto Protocol. This time the ‘Penny’ has dropped in Australia after decades of ignorance.

Our heart goes out to Kevin Rudd, the new Labour Prime Minister of Australia, for all his labourings on this topic. And we see no improvement in Australia’s relationship with PIs under his stewardship until all such sustainability indicators are pointing in a more mutually-beneficial direction. Show us your list of such pertinent indicators, and we’ll show you ours, or just read on.

Finally, if I was Australian Federal Minister of Agriculture and Environment, I would offer no drought relief to any Australian farmer (or Pacific farmer for that matter) until the whole agricultural profession took Bill Mollison (founder of Permaculture) seriously, took sustainability seriously, and gave more consideration to our future generations of Australians and PIs.

As Australians, we have ignored advice on sustainability for some 200 years, just ask our Aborigines. And now we want to say ‘Sorry’ to our Aborigines when we cannot even forgive ourselves for what we are continuing to do to desecrate these ‘Dreamlands’.

Finally, here in the Pacific, we PIs have formal cultural apologies, called ifoga or hou-lo-ifi or matanigasau, in Samoan, Tongan and Fijian, respectively, and Kevin Rudd, you should learn this culturally-sensitive process of apology before you ever attempt a culturally-correct apology in Australia. Kevin, this is good advice to you as well: do your apology, say “sorry”, but do it in accordance with the Aboriginal culture, the recipients of your apology, that’s if you want your national apology to have any meaning within the Aboriginal community as well as within the non-Aboriginal community.

If we PIs were Aborigines, we’d accept your apology, that’s the Pacific Way, but it would be conditional to signing the Kyoto Protocol and much much more.