scramble for vanuatu

This week I went with the director of the NGO I’m working for to see AUSAID (the Australian version of DFID) to ask them to fund the leadership project I’m working on …they should let us know next week.

Despite the pretty ropey state of many of the NGOs in Vanuatu (in terms of leadership, staff capacity and organization, financial planning etc) funding is actually not hard to come by. There’s something of a scramble for the south pacific going on which has presumably been going for ages but doesn’t make the news much in the UK. Ausaid and NZ aid are major donors and have been for years; the UK (DFID) pulled out much of its funding and rationalized its embassies in the south pacific some years ago although the EU is still much in evidence. But increasingly China is throwing money at the region (as it is in Africa) and unlike the Ausaid, NZ Aid, EU approach which is heavily bound up with bureaucratic processes attempting to ensure accountability and funding to achieve “good governance” the Chinese money comes with no strings attached.

In recent years the Chinese have built the parliament building, the Department and Ministry for Foreign Affairs (where John works) and a large workforce of Chinese labourers are currently building the head office of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (another regional economic trade and development grouping) – while hundreds of unemployed Ni-vans wander around with no work. One of the examples of the quid pro quo is that a Chinese company is building a large tuna processing plant just north of Vila threatening to pollute the beach and sea, damaging the tourist industry and the fish population (There is public opposition to the project which has apparently skipped the full environmental impact assessment stage of the planning process. Although it has to be said that the most vocal opposition comes from the ex-pats who have got large houses and fenced off bits of beach near the area in question.)

I hadn’t really thought about the strategic importance of little islands like Vanuatu before coming here but the approaches from the donor/ investor countries are enough to keep Vanuatu’s overstretched government ministers busy full time. And it’s hard to blame them for pretty much saying yes to everything that’s offered to them when they are unable to deliver the most basic services to their population. However this means strategic development doesn’t happen and rather than setting the agenda the government just says yes to the money on offer, so there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of gaps. At the moment the Vanuatu government has a firm ‘One China’ policy but this was interrupted some years ago when the government pillaged the country’s pension fund and Taiwan offered to plug the gap for a bit of recognition….

In the run up to the Australian election the parties there are jumping on the ‘war against terrorism’ band wagon and talking up the region’s potential for instability. Kevin Rudd the labor leader has even called it an axis of instability shamelessly echoing Bush and citing the violence and political unrest in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and the latest coup in Fiji. All in all the money coming into Vanuatu is pretty significant – an Ausaid report from 2006 claims that on a per person basis the pacific islands receive the most aid of any group in the world which is pretty extraordinary when you compare it to countries who are far more debilitated by war, famine, HIV etc and is also a pretty strong indictment of the failure of that investment to make an impact in Vanuatu…