SUNS 4311 Wednesday 28 October 1998
UNITED NATIONS: MALDIVES DISPUTES GRADUATION FROM LDC STATUS
United Nations, Oct 26 (IPS/Thalif Deen) - The tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives is challenging a U.N. assessment that removes it from the ranks of the world's "poorest" countries and elevates it to the status of a "developing" nation.
"We are being made to look more prosperous than we really are," Maldivian Foreign Minister Fathulla Jameel told IPS. "The whole exercise is unfair and unjustified."
The U.N.'s Committee for Development Policy has decided that the Maldives can be struck off the U.N.'s list of the world's 48 least developed countries (LDCs) - the poorest of the poor - because its per capita income is on the rise and its economy on the mend.
As a result, the Maldives may be stripped off the privileges and concessions provided to LDCs - from low-interest loans and debt write-offs to preferential market access and free airline tickets for
U.N. conferences and annual General Assembly sessions. But Jameel is crying foul.
In an interview, he argued that the Maldives, which stretches across some 1,200 coral islands and has a population of about 260,000, is dependent on tourism and fishing for its export earnings. Both economic sectors are not sustainable because they can be wiped out overnight due to weather or other external factors, he said.
"It is grossly unfair to deprive countries of LDC status until they are able to sustain their momentum of growth," Jameel pointed out.
Currently, tourism accounts for more than 40% of the Maldives' gross domestic product (GDP) but, as a foreign exchange earner, tourism is seasonal and unpredictable.
"The effects of global warming - such as sea-level rise, beach erosion, coral bleaching and salinization are threatening to jeopardize the viability and the long-term sustainability of our tourist industry," he said.
Moreover, the Maldives also has an expiry date as a nation.
According to some scientific predictions, the country could be wiped off the map 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?," Jameel asked.
In most of the world's small island states, the environment and the economy are intertwined. "Given the limited availability of resources, many small island developing states, including the Maldives, are not in a position to carry, by themselves, the burden of providing the high cost of environmental protection," he noted. Therefore, he said, "we are fully convinced that without adequate, new
and additional financial resources, transfer of environmentally sound technology on concessional and preferential terms, and the provision for human resources development, even the mere survival of our countries would be impossible," he added.
Jameel also said that most of the LDCs continue to depend heavily on foreign aid while some others are constant victims of natural disasters not of their own creation. Currently, there are three broad categories of countries recognised by the United Nations: industrial nations, developing nations and LDCs.
South Korea and Mexico decided themselves to leave the developing world and join the ranks of industrial nations - only to be hit immediately by major financial crises. So far, Botswana is the only LDC which has left the group of poorer nations voluntarily to join the developing world.
Meanwhile the Committee for Development Policy has recommended that three other LDCs - Samoa, Vanuatu and Cape Verde - should also be thrown out of the grouping by the year 2000. The recommendation has to be acted upon by the 185-member General Assembly.
All four LDCs, along with several small island developing states, are pushing for a new "vulnerability index" that will measure a country's economic status against "vulnerable factors" - such as hurricanes, floods, tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic disruptions and droughts. Currently, the size of population and per capita income are two of the determining factors of an LDC.
The Maldives has an annual per capita income of more than $450, the highest in South Asia -- outranking India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. But the world's small island developing states have rejected the use of per capita income as a yardstick to measure their fragile economies.
The 42 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 AOSIS includes Solomon Islands, Comoros, Seychelles, Cuba, Jamaica, Belize, Nauru, Guyana and the Maldives.
The per capita income - which reflects both the national income and the estimated population of a country - makes the world's tiny states look more prosperous than they really are, AOSIS argues.
One of the primary reasons for this is that per capita incomes of SIDS are often magnified by the small size of the population.
The proposed new index would evaluate fragile reefs, miniature rain forests, white sand beaches and every national asset which could be depleted or destroyed. The values that emerged from that process could be compiled and computed to arrive at an index as a determinant of development status or vulnerability, AOSIS says.
Until such an index is formulated, Jameel said, the Committee should defer its decision to oust the four countries from the ranks of LDCs.