MAURITIUS: Call for action over survival of small islands

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

PORT LOUIS, 10 Jan 2005 (IRIN) - Civil society groups on Monday called for greater action from the international community to address the special needs of Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

At the start of a week-long UN-sponsored meeting in the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, advocacy groups raised concern over the lack of progress in the implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action (BPoA), agreed at the first such conference a decade ago.

In 1994 donor nations and the islands agreed to tackle the challenges in partnership, but 10 years later SIDS remain increasingly vulnerable to external shocks, with aid to 45 of them having fallen by more than half in eight years.

Addressing around 2,000 participants, including some 25 world leaders, UN Under-Secretary General Anwarul Chowdhury highlighted that the "smallness" and "remoteness" of the islands continued to pose serious problems in providing international aid and foreign investment. He acknowledged that assistance projects were not viable when targeted for specific countries.

Chowdhury said the Mauritius meeting, which has been billed as a 10-year review of the BPoA, would adopt "a pro-active strategy" in examining priority issues, such as natural disasters, climate change, waste removal, freshwater supply, energy, trade imbalances and tourism.

In the wake of the tsunami emergency in southeast Asia, the establishment of an early warning system for the Indian Ocean is expected to top the agenda at the meeting.

Pynee Chellapermal, coordinator of the Civil Society Forum, told journalists the calamity that had befallen Asia in December was an "eye-opener" for the international community to the "fragility" of small island countries, and it was "critical" that donors pledged their support to the development of such a system.

But while the alert system is expected to dominate talks at the summit, delegates stressed that there were many other pressing concerns facing small islands.

Chowdhury said the "dearth of resources, poor human and institutional capacity" and the "lack of technology transfer" were also to blame for chronic underdevelopment.

The tiny Comoros archipelego, between the coast of East Africa and Madagascar, is among several island states handicapped by their small size and isolated geography.

This island group's dependency on a handful of crops for revenue generation has made it increasingly vulnerable to external markets. Today, the country is considered one of the poorest in the world, with some of the worst social indicators.

There is also growing concern over the dwindling supply of fresh water. Along with the Maldives, the Comoros is one of two islands nations in the world already at or below the "stress" threshold.

"Our environmental concerns have a lot to do with poverty: for example, the lack of fresh water doesn't have anything to do with the quantity of rain we receive annually - we just do not have the resources to harness the rain when it does fall," Mohammend Amidou, president of the Comoran Association for Environmental Development, told IRIN.

He noted that in some parts of the archipelgo less that 10 percent of the population had access to safe drinking water.

Apart from assessing the progress made over the past 10 years, and pushing for greater south-south cooperation, delegates are also expected to tackle emerging new issues, such as market access, the spread of HIV/AIDS and new security concerns relating to the global war on terrorism.

[ENDS]