Opinion & Commentary
Game of Pacific cop and dodgers
The Howard Government's decision to help the Solomons by restoring civil order to the South Pacific islands is welcome.
But unless the underlying economic problems that have caused stagnation are remedied, Australian troops will be in Solomon Islands forever.
Violence has been escalating in the Solomons because the population has been growing at 3.9 per cent annually but economic growth has been negligible, and as a result per capita income has declined. Women work hard to supply food for the growing population, but in the traditional economy chainsaws have taken over from stone axes to make gardens, so there is little work for men. After three or four years of school, boys grow up in villages without work or income. Their entire lives are wasted. In Honiara, male unemployment is officially 50 per cent and in fact, including villagers who drift in and out of town, 80 per cent. The police and army are deeply implicated in daily violence through clan - wantok - relationships. Their armouries have become low-cost arms supermarkets.
The Solomons have not been short of income. Timber exports paid for the colonial administration until the mid-1970s. Since 1978, timber has earned $US1.3 billion (in 1998 dollars). The sale of fishing rights has added to this income. Since 1978, the Solomons have received aid of $US1.1 billion (also in 1998 dollars). Most of the 450,000 people living in the Solomons have not had a cent of this income. Public servants have not been paid regularly for years. The only bricks and mortar to show for it are a few extravagant government buildings in which parliament cannot sit because the Government claims it cannot afford the electricity costs.
The Solomons' economic problems arise from development strategies that combine the exploitation of economic rents (unearned windfall incomes) from natural resources (timber and fish) with communal and government welfare. Bilateral and multilateral aid has supported these strategies, with rents from aid adding to resource rents to create swollen government and a culture of corruption that, with joblessness, has led to crime.
The Solomons are rich in agricultural land that could support labour-intensive exports. The islands are beautiful. With security, they could develop a labour-intensive, service-oriented tourist industry. Timber exports and fishing-rights sales could also underpin rapid income growth for most of the population.
Communal land ownership has enabled the denuding of Solomons forests to be shared by a few village "big men" with central government politicians and their bureaucrat and business cronies in an orgy of waste and corruption. Huge private fortunes have been siphoned off with the help of the expatriate carpetbagger advisers that plague the Pacific. It is hardly surprising that young men growing into middle age without any expectation of work or income turn to crime and violence.
Aid has been treated as part of the national budget and spent on the recurrent expenditures of a swollen "democratically elected" central government. Years of aid for capacity building and improved governance have had no effect in this fundamentally flawed economy. Unfortunately, international financial institution loans have enabled the Solomons to borrow abroad from public and private sources. These funds have also been spent on recurrent expenditures, thus creating $US152 million (55 per cent of gross national product) of unsustainable debt by 2000.
The Solomons desperately need productive employment. A strategic aid project would advertise, to any group of villages wishing to transform their lives, that aid would pay for the costs of breaking up communal land into individually owned plots if, say, 75 per cent of villagers wished to farm effectively.
Aid would also pay for the materials costs of physical infrastructure (roads, landing jetties, mini-hydros and so on) and the social infrastructure of schools and health centres. Aid would be dispensed only if central government contributions for police, teachers and medical staff were forthcoming. In a suitably chosen area, a tourist component could be added. Such mutual obligation aid projects would mean a sharp departure from present support for recurrent central government practices while ensuring productive employment opportuni ties.
Without a radical move through aid to employment creation, the restoration of civil order won't have lasting effects. Australia will be increasingly drawn into the Pacific and in time will be hated for being the Pacific policeman.
Helen Hughes is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
