16th January 2000

Maldives-caught between devil and deep blue sea

The sharp-witted Jameel, who will soon complete 22 years as foreign minister of the Maldives, says his country is apparently caught between an unfriendly devil and a deep blue ocean.

The United Nations, and specifically the UN Committee for Development Policy, is playing the role of the devil wanting to strip the Maldives of its current economic ranking as one of the world's 48 least developed countries (LDCs).

The UN says the Maldives is no longer the 'poorest of the world's poor' and therefore wants to elevate it to the status of a 'developing nation'- on the same league as Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan.

But the Maldives, which has a population of over 260,000 people surviving on a fragile economy, is resisting the move and crying foul.

"We are being made to look more prosperous than we really are," complains Jameel. "The whole exercise is unfair and unjustified."

On a totally different front, the Indian Ocean archipelago is also battling the forces of nature threatening to swallow the tiny island.

Addressing a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of government in Kuala Lumpur years ago, the President of the Maldives, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, said that if his island nation is asked to host the same conference in the 21st century, chances were the world's leaders will have to meet at the bottom of the ocean.

A projected sea level rise - if and when it occurs- is expected to obliterate the Maldives and sink the island into depths of the Indian Ocean.

"The Maldives may be outside the cyclone belt," says Jameel. ''And we may have no rivers to flood, volcanoes to erupt or large forests to burn.''

"But my country is as vulnerable to natural disasters as any other. Indeed, for the past decade we have lived with the fear of being slowly engulfed by the rising waters of the mighty Indian Ocean that surrounds us,'' he admits.

The Committee for Development Policy says the Maldives has to graduate from a LDC to a developing nation primarily because its per capita income is on the rise and its economy on the mend.

The world's Small Island Developing States (SIDS), however, have rejected the use of per capita income as a yardstick to measure their economies.

The 41 members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) say the traditional measuring rod does not take into account the special circumstances of their 'ecological fragility' and 'economic vulnerability.'

The per capita income- which reflects both the national income and the estimated population of a country- makes the world's tiny state look more prosperous than they really are.

One of the primary reasons for this is that per capita incomes of SIDS are often magnified by the small size of the population.

If the graduation does take place, the Maldives stands to lose, including all the privileges and concessions which LDCs are entitled to- from low-interest loans and debt write-offs to preferential market access and increases in development aid.

Jameel argues that the Maldivian economy is dependent on two sources of revenue that are simply not sustainable: tourism and fishing.They can be wiped out overnight due to weather or other external factors.

"It is grossly unfair to graduate countries from LDC status unless they would be able to sustain the momentum of growth they have been able to achieve," he points out.

Tourism alone accounts for more than 40 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But as a foreign exchange earner, tourism is seasonal and fluctuating

"The effects of global warming - such as sea-level rise, beach erosion, coral bleaching, increasing stress on coastal ecosystems, salinization of freshwater aquifers and damage to infrastructure from tropical storms - are, however, threatening to jeopardize the viability and the long-term sustainability of our tourist industry," he complains.

According to predictions made by scientists, the Maldives is expected to be wiped off the face of the earth by the year 2050 because of a projected sea-level rise caused by global warming.

"What good is it to be elevated to a higher economic rank when you are threatened with extinction?," asks Jameel, a question for which the UN has no answer.

Reflection

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