Economics Of Biodiversity

In the past, exploiting Pacific biodiversity for economic gain was a fairly simple task for those involved. Paradoxically, developing economic prosperity now is much more difficult, with significantly fewer resources to utilise or economic leeway to maneuver.

Many Pacific Islanders will admit that living on tiny geographically isolated islands with finite resources, low wages, and a trade advantage tipped heavily in favor of the developed world is tough, especially when it comes to balancing their own budgets and the national bottom line.

As a result, what is now emerging across the region is a paradigm that highlights Pacific Islanders struggling at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, while facing lotto type odds of ever improving their lot.

Subsistence economies are commonplace in the Pacific, such as Kosrae, pictured.

Pacific Island efforts to turn the economic tide in their favor are also hampered by the similarity of their biodiversities. Taro, bananas and yellow fin tuna for example, tend to be common island exports. There is generally a lack of technology, a skilled labor force, or efficient infrastructure, but an increasing vulnerability to natural disasters. Regional transport costs and logistics are expensive. In comparison, the competing Asian labor markets have a decided edge by being cheaper, more market savvy and able to offer far more lucrative returns on investor capital.

What needs to be examined by Pacific leaders is how the interdependent dynamic between economics and biodiversity in the region functions, and what is required to extract the most value from this relationship.

The World Conservation Union has stated that "economic forces are the major cause of biodiversity loss-even though this destroys the very production base upon which we depend."

Meet Ma'atusi, a 36-year-old Samoan farmer, and father of five. Four years ago he moved his family from an outer island, to a new government subdivision near the capital Apia, for better job opportunities and wages.

Most mornings he is on the road near dawn, trudging three miles in search of forest timber to sell as firewood or as base material to make handicrafts. After having his chain saw stolen earlier, his tools for gathering firewood are simple: A lethally honed 28-inch Gerber axe, powered by a pair of 17-inch biceps.

"I used to plant taro but after the blight 10 years ago, I now have to do this," he says as the Gerber knifes into the trunk of an indigenous ifilele tree, which through over harvesting is now under threat of extinction. With help from his two sons, the tree is felled and the largest portions shouldered for the slow walk home. Once there, the logs are quickly cut up and bagged to be sold at the market for US$2 a bundle. He may be lucky to sell one or two day.

Ma'atusi is indifferent that one of the major threats to many plant and bird species is caused by land clearing, or that less than one fifth of the original vegetation of the Pacific remains in a natural state. The bottom line though is that like Ma'atusi, many people either do not know or don't care.

"It's a hard life that I have been given, but my kids can't eat a tree and a tree won't walk them to school," he says.

In various similar shapes and forms Ma'atusi's story reflects how local biodiversity is the basis for what all Pacific Islanders either consume or produce. In the region, biodiversity-based sectors supplies over 75 percent of the region's GDP, 90 percent of related paid employment, 60 percent of export revenues, and one third of all government revenues. It's clear that any economic advantage when driven in an unsustainable manner threatens the production source and methods that sustains them.

With so much economic value at stake, the impact from any type of disaster would have a devastating effect of greater magnitude than in other regions because of these islands tiny size and ability to recover. For example, a massive cyclone this year completely destroyed most of neighbouring Niue's biodiversity and left a clean up bill of close to US$47 million. The largest crop replanting operation in its history is now underway.

Throughout the region, conservation agencies are fighting an uphill struggle to persuade people, including governments and donors, that it is in their economic interests to conserve biodiversity, to invest in it, or to allocate budgets to it.

In spite of these difficulties there have been some positive moves. At last year's regional Finance and Economic Minister Meeting (FEMM) there was a written agreement that the region's finance experts would commit themselves to incorporating environmental perspectives when national budgets and regional strategies were being assembled. This far-sighted initiative signals a timely turning point in synthesizing investment opportunities for economic development and biodiversity.

The FEMM may wish to consider focusing on taxing harmful activities such as the emissions from heavy transport services, logging of our dwindling forests, mineral mining and cigarette imports and production. This would place the onus on consumers and the business community to pay the full environmental cost of their actions, and in theory free up millions of dollars to further the development of renewable energy systems, recycling, and waste management plus other technologies and practices essential to building a sustainable Pacific economy.

In the future Pacific corporations, government and other likeminded institutions, together, might review their policies and become the trip wire for marketing all manner of "green" products.

Failure to elicit even fundamental changes to current economic attitude on biodiversity is courting trouble of the worst kind. As Dr. Klaus Toepfer, the chief of the United Nations Environment Programme, has often stated, "Poverty and environmental decline go hand in hand."

The writer is director of the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme, which is based in Apia, Samoa. See www.sprep.org.ws