WELCOME INTO THE MOST SUSTAINABLE VILLAGE ON THE PLANET

Now, that's got you thinking hasn't it? The most sustainable village on the planet.

How can your village be THE most sustainable on THIS planet? We all now belong to one global village, interconnected unfortunately.

Anyway, putting it very simply, and sometimes crudely, we in the Pacific have had enough of the negative development impacts forced upon us from outside the Pacific Region.

1. We've suffered, and are still suffering, from French nuclear testing and all its contaminants. Mind you, the Australians, the British and the Americans have had their fair share of the inputting as well, leaving us Pacific Islanders (PIs) in a shocking health state. Radiation fallout from other countries as well, such as South Africa, has fallen on the Pacific for over 50 years unbeknown to most of us.

We Pacific Islanders, call us PIs, have had enough of this. The polluters need to pay. We need appropriate legislation to protect ourselves from these deliberate impacts. It's costing lives, PI lives.

2. And now today, we PIs are forced to swallow all your carbon emissions regardless of its impacts on our health and infrastructures. Climate health is now our major concern as pandemics of malaria and dengue fever are predicted with greater frequency, increased severity and in areas where these diseases never occurred before. Global climate change impacts are causing lives to be lost here in the Pacific, today. And who accepts responsibility?

3. Samoa, for example, is facing serious pollution from pesticides and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs). But, countries outside the region have possibly stopped using them, yet they continue to export these POPs to Fiji, Samoa, Cooks, etc.

Why? Come on Bro, enough is enough.

If you are making environmental legislations in your Pacific Rim Countries, then please think of your Pacific neighbours as well, and include us in your legislations, banning, for example, the export of banned POPs from your country to our PICs.

4. And this is a real touchy point: Fair Trade Relationships. We need mutual/multilateral legislation to help protect our very limited exports from Pacific Island Countries (PICs). You stole, speaking crudely, our rainforests, our coconut oil markets, our kava markets, etc. with false accusations knowing full-well that it was leading to the loss of our unique wildlife species, our minute rural incomes and even now our cultures. Today, we have increasing poverty within the Pacific because of your trade arrangements in the past and present (and future?).

We are now exporting organically-certified nonu (Morinda citrifolia), it is our last hope for some years to come. Luckily, it has become our largest agricultural export crop in Samoa at least, worth 10s of millions of dollars. It's a native fruit with traditional medicinal properties, some see it as a love potion. But it's our property rights, our intellectual rights as PIs, so please don't replace all your wheat and wool and cotton and start planting nonu, under-cutting the PIs again.

5. Then you send us all your waste animal fats, labelled as 'edible fats' - edible for whom? You've all gone onto your vegetable oil diets and yet you are advising PIs to go onto your waste lard diet. Thanks for your concerns for our health and wealth. Anyway, we PIs now hear that many vegetable oils actually contribute to macular degeneration (blindness) - wonder how coconut oils fair in this pathogenesis? So. be careful, what goes around comes around.

6. Wait for it, you then target the ill-informed PIs, that's all of us, knowing that we cannot even afford one anti-tobacco TV advertisement per week. We are inhaling your tobacco here in the Pacific at an alarming rate, and luckily, we now have more employment at the British American Tobacco Samoa Company plant right here in Samoa. We are frantically targetting children and women and it's working well: tobacco sales are up, highest ever. Thanks a lot.

7. Name one country in the Pacific with an AIDS epidemic, today, 2008. Come on. Do you know one such country where the incidence of AIDS has exceeded the 1% epidemic level? In fact, PNG is now 1.6% and rising. More deaths, more orphans, lost human resource development, too few medications and no medical staff to treat all the infected villagers. And who cares? Are the Pacific Rim aid partners coming to the rescue of these PIs, in appropriate force? No. Why not?

8. Then there's diabetes pandemics, one kilogram of sugar imported/consumed per person per week - the national average in some Pacific villages. This is suicide at this dose rate. Who cares? Can we limit the amount exported to these PICs or is this also against your Human Rights and fair trade agreements? Now, let's be fairer Bro.

9. Transboundary crime allows Australia to be awarded the world record for expenditure on illicit drugs/person/year - only $USD5oo/person/year - just multiply this figure by 25 million people and you have a real dent in the economy. Well, we PIs have seen the light Bro, and we also now have villages whose main export is illicit drugs. You have the market it seems, we have the soils and the labour. Jointly, we have a deal (excuse the pun). We PIs need to inject some common sense into this argument: our societies are breaking down, our homes are being broken into, home safety has been thrown out the window, food security is being affected as we replace our food crops with cash crops, illicit crops.

TO CONCLUDE:

Is this the development environment we want for our PI Kids in the future? The answer is certainly "No".

Thanks to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a $USD3 billion investment is being made globally to see if we can sustainably develop our villages a little better than we are at present.

We PIs put together a PAS, a Pacific Alliance for Sustainability, a pro-active effort to address these above issues, but include food security, global climate change mitigation and adaptation, pollution reduction, biodiversity conservation and much more.

The GEF-PAS now plans to spend, along with its co-financiers and Pacific aid partners, in excess of $USD500 million over the next 5-10 years to ensure each village has attained sustainable livelihoods for all its Kids, all future generations, on all islands. Possible? Let's try.

With a little more commitment from all the stakeholders, this is indeed achievable, But, firstly, we need to jointly put a stop to the excesses, the negative impacts, the unfair trade practices, the increasing global climate changes, the poor governance.

We PIs may very well have had, once upon a time, the most sustainable villages on the planet. We had an ocean that covered 1/3 of the globe, laiden with foods, we had 300,000 islands, 3000 languages and thousands of years of proven experience in sustainable living. Times may have been tough, but we were in harmony with nature, there was a balance and we were proud of it. Then along came this economic change that some argue, successfully mind you, to be economically disasterous, economically non-sustainable when you couch it in natural resource terms. View www.neweconomics.org for the other side of the coin - fascinating.

Trust us, we could navigate between these islands thousands of years before Cook and others, eating off the ocean - we were sailing on a supermarket, drinking sharks' blood, eating algae and seaweeds, turtles, even whales. Today these skills have been lost.

Epistemology, the study of traditional knowledge, is a dying art as well. Some of us are ashamed to be PIs, we go to school with a can of soft drink and a packet of deep fried chips. The days of eating dried fish and drinking a coconut are nearly over. Why? We PIs hold the secret to good living and good health, yet we are turning our back on it. Afterall, we are the real Professors of Sustainability.

So let's prove it.

Let's put an Operations Manual together and develop our PI villages sustainably again. With GEF-PAS's help, we can do it.

But before we sign-off, some things are going to be very hard for us PIs to stomach, but we owe it to our Kids, the next generations of PIs. For example:

A. All PICs may need an anti-corruption legislation approved in our Parliaments before the end of the year, 2008. No buts. Let's do it. We've tried before, but failed.

Let's make GEF-PAS funding conditional - sign all the global environmental/developmental conventions and you get 100% of the funding (conditional). Sign only 50% of these conventions, and you get 50% of your allocation as a PIC. Possible? Acceptable to all?

We need some developmental stewards - let's push ourselves beyond the usual PI limits. Afterall, we need to serve our PI Kids, offering to give them back our islands in excellent shape.

IN SUMMARY

We PIs have already the largest rate of loss of bird species in the world, right here in Oceania, Shame.

We in Oceania have the highest loss of traditional indigeneous cultures/languages in the world.

We have the highest rate of loss of tuna/pelagic species/quantities in the world (can someone please confirm this?). Anyway, whats it matter? We are told we have only 3 years stock of edible migratory fish species left in the whole Pacific. Tough, tough for the Kids.

We're planting palm oil in the Asia/Pacific region at the expense of the lungs of the earth (our forests), draining peat swamps when 1/3 of our wetlands have gone already and 1/3 are degraded already, killing 50 orangutans a week in Sumatra alone as their rainforest habitat is felled. Breast-feeding soon ceases. The mothers die also from starvation. Who cares?

And Australia has the highest mammalian extinction rate of modern times. And who is counting the losses? Native plant extinction rate also goes to, wait for it, Australia again. Congratulations Australia for your guardianship, your stewardship. Congrats Bro!

The River Murray has stopped flowing in Australia, its largest water-filled artery, the circulatory system of a whole continent held to ransom by the largely non-sustainable graziers and agriculturalists, most refusing to adopt the most sustainable farming practices (as per the new Federal Labour Minister for Agriculture who is rightfully holding back on committing to paying-out drought-relief dollars to those who are causing much of the environmental damage in Australia, affecting us all). Its salinity levels reaching an all-time high, the river water levels now below sealevel. Thank God there is a new Government in Australia. But will that be enough? Probably not. Australia is wrestling with Federal ownership of water resources, but it cannot even achieve this amount of progress. Why didn't all the farmers vote Labour long-ago? Will they all vote for Labour in the future, even if it helps their pockets and their sustainability? Probably not.

Well, what is your response to how best to mange our PI villages sustainably. Forget Australia. it's an 'environmental basket-case'. At least we have time to save our Pacific Islands from such extensive damage, but we need to learn how to go about this.

Is an Operations Manual important, even necessary? Probably not. But at least you can say "we tried".

So, for a purely academic exercise, that worries me, let's see if we can test our mettle, put all the necessities on paper, compile all these ideas/practices/experiences into an Operations Manual, then circulate it for, wait for it, for all the possible objections as well. I know, let's then do it purely for PI epistemological reasons and see if we can trace our cultural roots, our ancestors' reasonings. We owe it to our Kids.

We may, however, need to recruit an anthropologist to help us with our thinkings, both good and bad. We may then need to set-up a Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Development in the Pacific, I mean a CRCSDP established in the Pacific, by PIs, for PIs, staffed by PIs. To complete this exercise, we'll need a Project Coordinator, funded by GEF-PAS, to make it all happen, and quickly. And let's get it under-written by the World Bank, the Pacific Forum, SPREP, SPTO, SPC, UNWTO, WTO, UNDP, ADB, FAO, WHO and all the rest who have been paid to complete such an exercise in village development and sustainability over the past 30-40 years, but with little to no success, and even less accountability.

By December 2008, if we complete this Pacific Village Development Operations Manual, we PIs will know exactly where we stand, what the hurdles/barriers are to sustainability, where to invest our environmental/developmental dollars, and on what conditions. But, we will need some real basic rules:

Rule No 1. - And the following rule stands: no global conventions signed/ratified, and their obligations not being met in a timely fashion, then no funds allocated to this PIC. Sorry Bro.

Secondly, Rule No 2. And all on-going non-sustainable practices within your PIC and neighbouring Pacific Rim Countries also need to cease immediately. Our Pacific Rim aid partners will under-write us (hopefully) with all their proposed savings made on removing all illicit drug sales (just read Development Journal, 2006, a whole Issue devoted to illicit drugs and development issues, and the Pacific was highlighted and for good reason).

Rule No 3. - Make no more rules until Rules 1 and 2 successfully enforced by each PIC, by each PI, by each Pacific Rim Country.

All sounds too simple.

But, please, seriously, give us your comments. We need to learn from your experiences, both good and bad. And we need to act now, it will be cheaper in the long-run.