Cover Story
Cook Islands' Biggest Challenge
How to stop brain drain? The increasing number of Cook Islanders leaving the islands is arousing speculation about the future of
Down, down, down. That's the way it is with the population of the Cook Islands. The dive continues to arouse speculation about the future of this small country of 14 islands. By the end of March this year, the country's estimated resident population was down to 13,400, about 8000 less than when the country's economy crashed in 1996, under a NZ$100-million debt built up by a mixture of reckless, feckless and corrupt government.
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There are about 80,000 Cook Islanders abroad, mostly in New Zealand and Australia, which give them free access. Will the drain continue until a point at which there isn't enough local manpower to keep the place going? Already there is some controversy, and some resentment about the number of Fijians, probably about 100, being hired by hotels that claim that insufficient locals are available.
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If one of the country's worst government-inspired scandals, the partly completed shell of a 300-room resort is at last finished and opened, who will staff it? But Ewan Smith, president of the Cook Islands Chamber of Commerce and boss of the successful local airline, Air Rarotonga, has doubts about the validity of some population statistics.
The rate at which Cook Islanders are evacuating the country seems to be flattening out. All the claims about manpower difficulties, really, come from the accommodation sector, he says.
"As to whether people don't want to work in that sector or it is not appealing enough, I am not quite sure. But there are other sectors that are not having that problem."
What riles some critics of the Fijian intake by tourism, he says, is that "really we want to front our tourism industry with Cook Islanders, who are one of the reasons why visitors come here. You hear people talk about full employment. But what we need to do is to talk about people reaching their economic potential. I am not convinced that we have done everything we can to ensure that we are developing our local human resources to the extent we should."
Smith says it could be that some hotels are importing Fijian hands because they can be exploited as cheap labour. "The question is are they being exploited because they are being paid shift money and they can't go anywhere else? I suspect they are being exploited. Secondly, the reason I suspect that hotels may not have as many Cook Islanders working for them is because they are not paying competitively, and thirdly, here we are with a tourism industry and we don't even have a full-time hospitality school."
Tourism is the country's biggest business. There were a record 74,575 visitors last year, of whom 65,168 were vacationers. The figure will dip a bit this year due to the impact of last September's attacks in the United States, and the folding of a Canadian airline that had run seasonal tour flights to Rarotonga.
What worries Cook Islanders is their complete dependence on one foreign airline, Air New Zealand. Several weeks ago it announced changes to Cook Islands services that would have cost tourism dearly. A delegation had to rush to Auckland to persuade the airline to maintain its capacity into Rarotonga.
"We have to be realistic," says Smith, who was part of the delegation. "We are talking 75,000 visitors a year, which is a lot for us and certainly a huge increase from 25,000 ten years ago. But it is doubtful if you can support more than one airline here, and that has really been the issue.
"It is a bit precarious, but I think the meeting we just had with Air New Zealand was very constructive because we have to look at it as an economic partnership. Air New Zealand is our most significant economic partner so anything they do can have quite a significant effect on our economy. "What we also have to recognize is that we have to be a competitive transit point in the Pacific. It is no use to just sit here and say that our fuel prices and our landing fees and our level of service are our business.
"What we have agreed to do is review our on-going competitiveness to ensure those things we can change are put right. Are costs realistic? Are they competitive with French Polynesia and Fiji?"
Short of some global catastrophe, Cook Islands tourism is bound to grow. Americans adore Rarotonga. "It's just like Hawaii used to be." And now they and others are discovering Aitutaki, 240 kilometres north of Rarotonga. With its lagoon and easy lifestyle, it has enormous appeal. One upmarket resort, the Aitutaki Pearl, owned by French Polynesian businessmen, is doing well. The local owners of Rarotonga's upmarket Pacific Resort will open a very superior place there at the end of this year, and several small properties have opened recently.
Smith says the privately owned Air Rarotonga is confident enough about Aitutaki to have decided to lease a second Saab 340 prop-jet to join one it runs three times a day to the island from Rarotonga six days a week. And the government has committed itself to sealing one of the large wartime-built airstrips to take Boeing 737-size jets.
The Cook Islands is unlikely to attract a second big airline for years. Aloha Airlines of Hawaii is said to be interested in operating to Rarotonga and Fiji's Air Pacific has bouts of thinking about doing so.
At Rarotonga, there is serious debate about whether the country's largest island, a place of striking beauty, but just 31 kilometres around and home to 8000 locals, can absorb more tourism without fatally damaging its environment. Some damage is already happening; sewage, waste disposal, runoff into the lagoon. The signs are there. But the government's environment minister, Norman George, insists the government is one of the most environmentally conscious ones in the world and won't let the physical fragility of the Cooks be ruined by overdevelopment.
Smith doesn't agree that Rarotonga is full up. "When people say we shouldn't expand tourism any more and we shouldn't do any more of this or any more of that, then what's the answer?
"If you don't have one, you are heading for an economic decline which will increase the outflow of people.
"We have a lot of boutique accommodation, which is good. But I think a new international hotel and a golf course to go with it would put us into another league."
Smith says imminent new population figures "will tell a pretty predictable story. The least migration outflow will be from the better parts of the country: Rarotonga followed by Aitutaki followed by Manihiki because that's where the money is."
Apart from tourism, the only other big money maker for the Cook Islands is pearl farming centred on the atolls of Manihiki and Penhryn in the north. Pearl exports made NZ$18.39 million out of a total of NZ$19.96 million exports in 2000, and NZ$14.59 million of NZ$16.1 million exports in 2001.
The outlook for pearls was glowing. But a crash of pearl prices is arousing alarm amongst pearl farmers, who complain that the average price is down to NZ$20 a pearl. This is less than one-tenth of what they used to get.
There's still plenty of space in the lagoons of Manihiki and Penrhyn for more pearl farms, although a scare at Manihiki two years ago, caused by an oyster disease, was a hint that some pearling might be too intensive.
Pawpaw fruit, live fish, shell and some clothing are the only other exports but don't make a million dollars in total. Agriculture exports to New Zealand were once quite significant but fell off. "There are two factors for the decline of agriculture," Smith says. "There was certainly a bit of a turning point when quarantine protocols with New Zealand changed and it took us several years to get the process in order to be able to export a variety of things again. But I think it is economic competition for resources. It is all very well to say everyone should be out planting vegetables, but what if you don't want to plant and prefer to work in tourism or wear a nice uniform and earn more money?"
It now looks as if tuna fishing could become important. The Cook Islands is one of the few countries in the region that has not developed serious fishing. Yet at 1.8 million square kilometres, it has one of the largest of exclusive economic zones (EEZs). This year six locally owned long-line boats have begun serious commercial fishing. Catches in the northern Cooks are good with fish being sold to canneries in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and some exported to the sashimi market.
A landmark event for the economy will be the opening, due in about two months, of an advanced fish and vegetable processing factory built to the highest standards and planned to supply local and overseas customers. There's been nothing like it in the Cook Islands before. The NZ$900,000 venture is the idea of Jack Cooper and his partner Chris Douglas, proprietors of Trader Jacks, a hugely successful and famous waterfront restaurant and bar in Avarua. Cooper is working on this project with some passion.
A well managed combination of tourism, pearls, fishing and agriculture could fix up the Cook Islands very nicely. It would even encourage Cook Islanders, disillusioned with the dubious quality of the country's politics, to return home.
And then, one day, some day perhaps, someone might devise a means of profitably mining the estimated 7.5 trillion, yes trillion, tonnes of manganese, cobalt and other metal content nodules, lying 5000 metres deep on the floor of its EEZ. The cobalt quantity in them alone is estimated to meet world demand for more than 500 years.
One stumbling block for Cook Islands progress, is the quality of government; an institution wracked by petty political and personality squabbles. Backstabbing is the constant state of play here. "Political reform is seriously overdue," Smith says. "We are in a fourth coalition in as many years and this just does not make for good long-term continuing government.
"Basically, you have majority of seats in parliament representing only about one-third of the population. Putting coalitions together is relatively cheap when it comes to buying off seats around the place. What that does is that it frustrates the needs of the majority, and that is what has to change. Representation has got to become more proportional.
"Once that happens things will change. It can occur in two ways; either the current crop of politicians decide they have to do something for the good of the country, and put up some options for political reform.
"It appears very unlikely that they will do that. So the other alternative is for some people to get together in all the electorates and make them do it."
The challenge, Smith says, is finding ways for Cook Islanders to find their economic potential. The population in general certainly isn't finding it. They are happy, nice people, but certainly people capable of achieving more here, or in New Zealand and Australia."
