The American Way
On July 18, 1947, the United Nations established the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which included the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands (including Palau), and the Northern Mariana Islands, all of which were collectively referred to as Micronesia. This territory, which comprised approximately 2,100 islands and over 3,000,000 square miles of ocean, was placed under the stewardship of the U.S. Navy and administered from a military base in Guam. In recent memory, not only had Micronesia served as the point of departure for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands had been used as a nuclear test site by the U.S. military, and Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas was the home base of the only two aircraft in the history of the world to drop atomic bombs on civilians.
On July 18, 1947, the United Nations established the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which included the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands (including Palau), and the Northern Mariana Islands, all of which were collectively referred to as Micronesia. This territory, which comprised approximately 2,100 islands and over 3,000,000 square miles of ocean, was placed under the stewardship of the U.S. Navy and administered from a military base in Guam. In recent memory, not only had Micronesia served as the point of departure for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands had been used as a nuclear test site by the U.S. military, and Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas was the home base of the only two aircraft in the history of the world to drop atomic bombs on civilians.
In consideration of the tactical role that these islands played in the second World War, Micronesia was uniquely designated a “strategic trust” by the U.N. Security Council (McHenry 5). This essentially equated to the annexation of these islands in the interest of the United States military. In 1951, as the Cold War heated up, administrative control of these islands was turned over to the U.S. Department of the Interior, but Micronesia nonetheless continued to be governed from a military installation in Saipan (6).
As part of the U.N. trusteeship, the United States was obligated to “promote Micronesia’s economic, social, educational and political development” (6), but for the first fourteen years of this arrangement, very little progress was made in any of these areas aside from the imposition of an American-style political system upon a resolutely traditional social structure. In 1961, when the Kennedy administration received a U.N. report on what were considered primitive living conditions on many of these islands, an “accelerated” development program was put into place.
This amounted to little more than short-term economic solutions for Micronesia’s many perceived problems with the hopes that this territory could eventually serve as a shining example for the rest of the world to see in terms of the successful U.S. development of its “third world” allies. It was to be a marketing tool for capitalism. However, Micronesia was then and continues to be a resounding failure of American brand imperialism, proof that a one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy fails to take into account the idiosyncrasies of these geographically isolated cultures that had evolved socially but remained materially consistent for over four thousand years.
Location, Location, Location
In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs argues that, “It is time to banish the bogeyman of geographical determinism, the false accusation that claims about geographical disadvantage are also claims that geography single-handedly and irrevocably determines the economic outcome of nations” (58). According to Sachs, drawing on the theories of Adam Smith, all a country needs to develop its economy is a “proximity to sea-based trade” and an investment in transportation infrastructure, most notably including trains (57).
Let us say, hypothetically, that a very short railway system was built on each of these tiny islands. Not only would this be a complete waste of resources, but the tracks would quickly rust, rot and be overgrown with plant life — much like how the decrepit roads face the constant antagonism of the abundant rain. In a similar respect, the telephone lines that connect these islands to the rest of the world pass through thousands of miles of some of the deepest ocean in the world, making their upkeep rather difficult. In the Marshall Islands, almost all building materials have to be imported. To put it lightly, maintenance of infrastructure is an uphill battle here, and geographic isolation is indeed a prohibitive factor in the development of their economies. Jeffrey Sachs, as an economist, provides no solution that would alleviate the poverty of these islands, even by his own definition of the term.
A Different Paradigm
Micronesia, it must be remembered, quietly resides on the far edge of the western world, over seven thousand miles from Washington, D.C. As such, their economies, including the logistics upon which they operate and the metrics that are used to measure poverty, maintain few parallels to that of their American colonists.
Originally, the U.S. plan, as stipulated by the U.N. charter, was for Micronesia to eventually attain relative self-sufficiency as they had during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1914 to 1944. During that time, there was a brief period where they were exporting more than they were importing. However, the Japanese had also exploited and extracted what few resources were available on these islands, notably including phosphate, and they did so largely with their own immigrant labor force, totaling approximately 80,000 Japanese citizens at its peak (McHenry 5). Meanwhile, the indigenous people were sometimes forced into slavery to perform the more grueling and physically demanding labor. In light of these factors, the Japanese occupation more closely resembled the traditional understanding of colonialism than that which would soon follow.
During the war, several key battles were fought over these islands, amounting to 6,288 American casualties and 22,810 more who were wounded. An estimated 5,000 Micronesian civilians were killed in the crossfire, which was approximately ten percent of their population at the time. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese casualties was presumed to be much higher than both these figures combined (McHenry 54). At the end of the war, when the Japanese citizens still living in Micronesia were forced to repatriate, they took with them much of the skilled labor that had developed and maintained what little industry and infrastructure there was up to that point, much of which had been destroyed anyway.
In Our Own Image
The original Trusteeship Agreement stipulated that the United States was “to foster the development of such political institutions as are suited to the trust territory and shall promote the development of the inhabitants of the trust territory toward self-government or independence, as may be appropriate to the particular circumstances of the trust territory and its peoples and the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned… to promote the social advancement of the inhabitants, and… to promote the educational advancement of the inhabitants” (McHenry 33). Suffice to say, when the United States took over this territory, the Department of the Interior aimed to rebuild Micronesia in our own image, establishing American capitalism and democracy in a place where these concepts were about as foreign as ice cream and hamburgers.
Over the millennia, the civilizations of these island cultures, “primitive” as they may seem to the West, had evolved to meet the unique demands of living on small, remote islands, where the family is the basic social unit rather than the individual. Life in this type of an environment, limited in scale and in its connections to the outside world, presents few alternatives. Even the tribal leaders in Micronesia recognize that there is no self without the community, so individual decisions tend to favor the greater good. In this sense, democracy had existed in Micronesia long before the U.S. occupation, just in a different form. Although Micronesia had previously been occupied by other imperial powers, including Spain, Germany and Japan, it was the United States who took steps to actively change their fundamental social structure. Their indigenous cultures have suffered tremendously as a result.
Neocolonial Politics
In the late 1970s and early 80s, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was divided into the Federated States of Micronesia (henceforth referred to as FSM, consisting of four main islands: Pohnpei, Yap, Chuuk and Kosrae, which were formerly recognized as part of the Caroline Islands), the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, as each of these regions declared varying degrees of independence from U.S. control. Only Palau achieved full independence within the decade that followed, and only after ten years of negotiating a nuclear ban with the U.S. In 1986, the Marianas established their status as a commonwealth, similar to that of Puerto Rico.
That same year, representatives from FSM and the Marshall Islands signed Compacts of Free Association, which granted these territories continued financial assistance from the U.S. for a finite period of time in exchange for exclusive military rights in this region. For the remainder of this paper, I will be exploring the contemporary bilateral relationships between the United States and these two protectorates, as well as consider some potential solutions to the significant difficulties they face in the near future.
It should also be noted that ever since the American occupation, they have been using the U.S. dollar exclusively; it was made their official currency when FSM and the Marshall Islands became freely associated states. Aside from the giant stone coins on Yap, there has never been a local currency on these islands, and even the idea is rather foreign. In many ways, Micronesia marks the border between East and West. Emblematic of this point, cars here drive on the right side of the road, despite the fact that most of these vehicles were imported from Japan and therefore have steering wheels on the right.
The Value(s) of Capitalism?
For the academic year of 2011 through 2012, I taught English at the College of Micronesia, National Campus, on the island of Pohnpei, home of FSM’s capital and center of government. This experience certainly spawned my interest in the politics of this region, though admittedly, I must rely on the expertise of others in order to ground my argument, the merits of which I can only confirm and substantiate with my own observations. That said, I can nonetheless offer anecdotal evidence to support my claims, but they do not form the basis of my argument. For example, as an English instructor, I can note that generally speaking, my students were reticent but optimistic, in spite of a future that looks rather bleak. Frankly, I suspect that most of them saw little point in the education that they were receiving, as there were very few prospects for skilled employment within their communities upon graduation.
In both semesters that I taught there, after the third week of class, I found that attendance suddenly dropped by nearly half, as I soon learned that many students only stuck around long enough to collect the remaining funds left over from their Pell Grants, which is one of the major forms of U.S. government aid outside of the compact. The value of their education, in very pragmatic terms, could be quantified as a source of supplemental income, comparable to about five months of full-time employment. This speaks not only of some of the issues surrounding higher education and unemployment in these territories, both of which I will explore in more detail in the pages that follow, but also of the extreme poverty endured by the people who live there, even today. Of course, it should be noted that this is a poverty measured in purely monetary terms by U.S. standards. According to a 2012 report from the World Bank, the gross national income per capita in FSM is $3,310 and $4,140 in the Marshall Islands (data.worldbank.org). In spite of these figures, starvation and homelessness on these islands are virtually nonexistent.
Promoting Dependency
In 2012, the World Bank also reported that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Development Assistance Committee has spent a total of nearly $126 billion dollars in Micronesia since 1947 (data.worldbank.org), though development in both FSM and the Marshall Islands has been relatively stagnant for much of the past thirty years. The second Compact of Free Association, signed in 2003 for both FSM and the Marshall Islands, is set to expire in 2023, at which point the direct foreign aid that accounts for over 40% of their GDP will no longer be a source of revenue for these islands. In the interim, available funds are due to gradually decrease as a higher percentage of the promised $130 million dollars per year in grants goes toward a trust fund instead of being made immediately accessible for current expenses (www.state.gov).
Basically, according to most experts, the governments of FSM and the Marshall Islands have less than ten years to significantly develop their infrastructures, industry and trade capacity if they are to maintain even the relatively poor standard of living that they have today. In his article, Micronesia: Lifelines Grow Short, Colin Woodard states that, “The economies of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia are not just dependent on U.S. grants and assistance; U.S. assistance is the economy. It accounts for the majority of the gross domestic product of both countries” (18). After all, we must also consider that most of the financial aid that these countries receive is then spent directly on U.S. imports.
As Guy Debord succinctly argues in Society of the Spectacle, “Economic growth frees societies from the natural pressures which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that they are not liberated” (40). Micronesians are now subservient to what might be termed “economic imperialism,” for instead of subjects, the United States has made them into consumers of commodities that they cannot afford.
Looking Ahead
The United States Congress has explicitly advised that the Compact of Free Association will not be renewed for a third time upon its expiration in 2023. Due to changes in the logistics of modern warfare since World War II, it has been argued that Micronesia no longer serves a strategic military purpose, thus minimizing the U.S. incentive to maintain control over this territory. As Donald F. McHenry contends in his book Micronesia: Trust Betrayed, the United States has always favored self-interest over altruism in its relations with Micronesia, and as the strategic motive for maintaining control of these islands diminishes, so too is American interest in their economic development and sustainability.
In purely economic terms, both the United States and Micronesia have little to show for the vast sums of money that have been put into the development of this region. On Pohnpei, for example, electricity is still produced by very old diesel generators that constantly send plumes of black smoke into the atmosphere and are the cause of frequent blackouts. The roads are in terrible condition, due in no small part to the extreme levels of precipitation; petty theft is very common, particularly targeting foreigners; the primary and secondary schools are in an extreme state of disrepair and neglect; and the government, by many accounts, is bloated, corrupt and ineffective. Due to the remoteness of these islands, tourism in the region is largely non-existent, although there are currently plans by a Chinese company to build a casino on Yap.
Further, the waters that surround Micronesia — their primary source of sustenance for thousands of years — are being grossly overfished by foreign companies. Numerous experts have even claimed that the tuna population in this part of the Pacific Ocean will be completely decimated within the next thirty years, as current industrial fishing practices in the region are completely unsustainable. In its current state, Micronesia has very little going for it in terms of its place in the world economy, with limited hope for its future as well.
Isolationism vs. International Trade
For nearly as long as Micronesia has been under the control of imperial powers, self-sufficiency in the region has largely been thought of in terms of zero sum trade deficits. The key, it was argued, was to develop their industries to the point where they can export enough to viably afford that which they import without incurring deficits, the U.S., of course, being their number one trade partner since the end of World War II. However, I would like to assert that true self-sufficiency should entail minimizing imports and instead focusing on increased subsistence farming and fishing. To this end, the governments of FSM and the Marshall Islands should be promoting isolationism rather than increased foreign trade. Realistically, these islands have no industry that they can develop to the point where it will take the place of American foreign aid in the next ten years. The only commercially viable natural resource that they have is fish, which are being depleted by foreign commercial fishing. Sadly, it is not uncommon for these same fish to then be canned in another country and then sold back to Micronesians at a considerable markup.
With that noted, the island nations of Micronesia should be more assertive in protecting their fishing waters and should be developing their own infrastructure and industry in such a way as to minimize their reliance on expensive imports. The island of Kosrae, the least populous state in FSM, has already taken some initiative in this regard, as they have recently begun implementing plans to install wave-powered generators to replace their outdated diesel generators (www.huffingtonpost.com).
The other islands in Micronesia should be taking similar steps to minimize their dependence on imported fossil fuels and only taking from their waters what they need to support their own population. At the absolute very least, they should enforce sustainable practices and exercise much stricter control over the vessels that rob the ocean of fish, often destroying coral reefs in the process. The fines that are levied against these companies for illegal poaching, in the rare instances when they are fined at all, amount to far less than the profits attained through a single fishing expedition. To these companies, it is merely an incurred cost of business as usual.
In a similar respect, the education system of Micronesia needs to be restructured in such a way as to meet the practical needs of the community. Currently, most villages in FSM have their own primary schools, which function largely as de facto daycare providers, and most of the secondary schools on the islands have strong religious affiliations and are taught by young, American missionaries with little knowledge or experience in pedagogy, and even less awareness of the cultural norms of this region. On a practical level, the College of Micronesia serves very little purpose, as its “business model” (which is problematic in itself) is to let in as many students as possible, many of whom are functionally illiterate in English, despite the school’s accreditation with the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).
In theory, this should indicate the same academic standards as community colleges in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, but with very few exceptions, the students that I encountered would face extreme difficulty if they were to transfer to a four-year university in the continental United States. Furthermore, there are no governmental funds available for students to attend such institutions, making them prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest families. Although each class that I taught did have one or two excellent students, sadly, the majority of them were there either for the Pell Grants, or simply because it provided a rare opportunity to socialize with other people their own age outside of their extended families.
If the college was to raise their standards and scale down their programs, perhaps they could also allocate some funds to provide the scholarships that would be necessary for these exceptional students to pursue advanced degrees, arming them with knowledge that might then allow them to then return to their islands and help their communities with these skills acquired abroad. Micronesia needs a portion of their citizenry that is educated in matters such as medicine and the maintenance of public utilities, because when the money that is currently used to pay foreigners to perform these tasks dries up, their current standard of living will otherwise diminish considerably as a result.
The Family Unit
It is also important to keep in mind that these islands, separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles of open water, have only been brought together politically by imperial powers. As Phillip W. Quigg wrote in 1969, “The Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, like so many political entities today, is an historical accident of the colonial period and therefore an artificial creation. It is composed of a number of distinct cultures and at least nine languages plus many dialects” (495). Nonetheless, although the vast area that makes up Micronesia includes many different cultures, each with its own indigenous language and customs, there are numerous commonalities among the people who inhabit these islands.
Specifically, one example is that in Pacific island cultures, having to co-occupy such limited physical space meant that the needs of family (as understood to mean a tribe or community) must always supersede those of the individual. In fact, most Micronesians are taught at an early age to not stand out or to draw attention to oneself, as this negates the cohesion of the family unit. In school, this means that students should not raise their hands to answer questions or be publicly praised for performing well in their studies. Cynical as it may sound from a Western perspective, mediocrity is a virtue here. In a similar respect, the idea of pursuing one’s own individual ambitions is a very foreign concept, particularly if it fails to substantially benefit the community. This rather works against the idea of entrepreneurship as a remedy to pauperism, as suggested by Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty or Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom. In fact, the negative effects of a cash economy in Micronesia have clearly far outweighed the benefits. New structures of power have been built around capital that are in direct conflict with the old ways of life that have sustained these societies for thousands of years. Frankly, if ever there was a society in which communism could successfully be realized in its ideal (that is, communal, as opposed to bureaucratic) form, it may be in these remote societies of the Pacific islands.
Island Life
These are a people who value their leisure, and rightfully so. They do, after all, live in a tropical paradise. As Marx posits in his Fragment on Machines, increased industrial productivity would not increase their ability to enjoy the good life, but rather, it would merely increase capital through the exploitation of their labor. Minimum wage in Micronesia, which is only just below the average wage, is less than $2 an hour. With this in mind, if an able-bodied person worked an eight hour day in one of the few jobs available on these islands, they would earn a gross income for that day totaling about $15. This not even enough to buy three gallons of gas or one fifty pound bag of pig feed.
As could be expected in somewhere this far removed from the avenues of international commerce, anything that is imported is exorbitantly expensive, due mostly to the cost of transportation, which means that most commodities are priced at well beyond what most Micronesians can afford. The exceptions include cigarettes, canned meat, soda, chips, and other junk food, which have significantly contributed to the rising obesity epidemic on these islands over the past thirty years. In the Marshall Islands, “Virtually all food is brought in by ship. The Marshallese love canned, frozen, and processed food, so much so that infants keep landing in the hospital from malnutrition; in at least a few cases, mothers reportedly fed them only Cheez-Whiz and Coca-Cola” (Woodard 18).
From an evolutionary perspective, historically, Pacific islanders have not been exposed to such quantities of sugar and fat as they have in the past thirty years, and as such, their bodies have not adapted fast enough to process this sudden change in diet. Life expectancy in FSM is an average of 69.95 years, tied at 118th place with the malnourished citizens of North Korea. Life expectancy is 65.24 years in the Marshall Islands, which shares its dismal 157th place with war-torn Afghanistan (www.state.gov). Bear in mind, these are places with no dangerous predators or poisonous animals or insects, nor are there any active civil wars or even a widespread availability of guns. In the Marshall Islands, as well as the island of Kosrae in FSM, diabetes is now the number one cause of death. This is, of course, a mostly preventable disease, from which nearly half of the elderly population suffers (www.micsem.org).
Furthermore, the health care available to most Pacific Islanders is dismal at best. According to a 2008 report issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior, health care professionals on these islands are “without adequate resources and under severe shortages of experienced medical and support staff, necessary equipment and basic supplies, who struggle daily to do their jobs” (7). Anecdotally, while living on Pohnpei, there were reports of a child who died after being given the wrong dosage of medication at the local hospital, as well as several instances of blatant misdiagnoses where the patients suffered needlessly as a result. As I have suggested elsewhere, when the compact funds end, the health care situation will likely get considerably worse, as they will no longer be able to pay foreign doctors to live and work there, let alone have any money to import supplies and medicine.
Tribal Culture
Much like how the family trumps the individual in Micronesian societies, respect is more highly valued than law. Personal relationships in this region are based almost entirely on one’s place within a broader social network, which is hierarchical in terms of age and further delineated by gender. That is, a person is expected to show deference to one’s elders, particularly within one’s own family, and men and women have very different but complementary roles within this social order. Although Sachs contends that, “Traditional societies tend to be strongly differentiated in gender roles, with women almost always getting the short end of the deal” (36), Francis X. Hezel, who ran the Xavier High School on the island of Chuuk, where he has lived continuously for most of the past fifty years, sees the situation differently. He argues that, “The interplay of gender roles contributed greatly to the feeling that everything done within the community was the product of all” (120).
Hezel, who is also the principle organizer of the Micronesian Seminar, an online library and interactive forum designed to educate Westerners on the nuances of Micronesian life (from the perspective of a Jesuit missionary), additionally points out that, “In a traditional seafaring society in which men might be voyaging for long period of time and sometimes never return, women were the keepers of the home — and more importantly, the land. It is no exaggeration to say that in the matrilineal society of the islands the social edifice was built on the foundation of women. Women were the custodians of the land, the anchor of the family, providing continuity in the home and the community” (116).
This is a society that is in many ways incompatible with the Western concept of democracy. For example, ever since the introduction of electoral politics to Micronesia, it has been common practice for tribal chiefs and family elders to explicitly instruct the members of their respective clans how they should cast their ballots, thus undermining one of the key components of democratic rule (Hezel 42). Even in a supposed democracy, they willingly defer to a hierarchical social structure. This traditional system ensures that people are not treated equally, despite what the laws might suggest, as to do so would be seen as disrespectful to the elders and members of historically prominent families.
Further, if someone breaks the law, there may be punitive retribution, but moreover, justice is carried out by the families as dictated by the elders within the affected families. In particularly serious cases, this involves the transferral of land ownership, which is not only thought of as the extremely limited and valuable commodity that it is, but also, as the tangible property of matriarchal lineages. In other words, land, including the country itself, is thought of as an extension of the family. For this reason, there are no physical addresses in Micronesia. People who ride in cabs have to tell the driver the landowner’s name. This also complicates the industrial and commercial development of the islands, because land is owned by families, not individuals. To build something on a parcel of land requires the approval of the entire family, and land cannot be sold to foreigners. Even the U.S. Embassy in Kolonia, Pohnpei is built on leased property. Most of the cases that clog up the courts deal with land disputes, and most of these cases are only resolved by the decisions of tribal elders who remain outside of the official judicial system.
In addition, the idea of personal liberties has little resonance with most Micronesians, as they tend to think in terms of responsibilities rather than rights. As Hezel explains, “The prevailing social ethic in such societies was grounded on the individual’s duties to society, rather than on what one might expect to receive from others. Any formal rights that individuals possessed were linked to their status rather than to their personhood as such” (46). He continues, “In the minds of many, the modern advocacy for rights is one of the most pernicious contagions that the West has unleashed on traditional and proud societies: the misguided emphasis on ‘me’ rather than ‘us’” (47).
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
FSM and the Marshall Islands currently have two of the highest ratios of government employees to common citizenry among their relatively sparse population as compared to any other nation in the world, and the necessity of most of these bureaucrats is highly debatable. Moreover, Micronesia benefits from having such a large government only in the sense that they provide some of the only well-paying jobs, the money from which then finds its way back into the market economy — most of which ends up being spent on American imports, either directly, in the case of commodities, or indirectly, in the case of energy or other utilities. If, however, instead of spending so much on ineffective government employees, Micronesia was to institute state control of public utilities and offer subsidies in the market to help keep commodity prices affordable, then their economy would almost certainly be more robust than it currently is.
When the compact expires, these island nations will likely have no choice but to downsize their governments. With this in mind, as I have suggested, it would be more beneficial in the long term to focus on minimizing imports to only that which is essential. Just as we tend to view Micronesia by western standards of poverty, they are also judged by American standards of modernity. Many of the amenities that Micronesians currently enjoy, such as cable television, alcohol and processed food, are not by any means vital to their continued existence. In fact, one could certainly argue the exact opposite. With this in mind, if the governments of FSM and the Marshall Islands focused instead on fulfilling the most basic modern needs of the people who live there, including health care, clean water and electricity, as opposed to delivering them with the trappings of “modern” life, then in many ways, they would almost certainly be better off. That is, they should exercise a form of consumer austerity in terms of the availability of unnecessary goods, rather than cut vital social services.
Furthermore, tariffs should be imposed on all foreign imports and inter-island trade should be promoted in its place. As many of these islands are in fact very different from one another, some islands are better than others at producing certain staple commodities. Pohnpei, for example, is one of the wettest places on earth; if they were to invest in the harvesting and purification of rain water, they could then export it to the Marshall Islands, who currently import clean water in large quantities from the U.S. In a similar respect, if Pohnpei was to implement sustainable lumbering practices, some of the abundant trees that grow in the interior of the island could be made into building supplies to be exported to the atolls that lack such resources.
Additionally, if rice fields were established on an island that proves to be particularly conducive to its farming, then these crops could supply the rest of Micronesia with one of its staple foods, as opposed to having to import it from considerably further away. On at least one of the islands, a recycling center should also be built, which could alleviate some of the pollution and waste, which are rapidly becoming very serious issues. This could also provide local industry with a source of raw materials. FSM could also market the lease of internet domains ending in .fm to online radio stations. The island nation of Tuvalu in the South Pacific has taken a similar strategy with their .tv domains, which has earned them over $50 million in royalties over the past twelve years (www.nytimes.com).
Micronesia absolutely must reclaim sole stewardship of its waters and not lease fishing rights to foreign companies. If anything, they should invest in their own deep-sea fishing boats and then export the fish at a fair market value, rather than be paid pennies on the dollar for the leasing of their waters. This would also allow them to maintain direct control over the potential for over-fishing and the destruction of coral reefs. Fish is truly the one significant commodity that Micronesia can offer the world market at a volume that would justify the development of its industry, but foresight and oversight would have to be implemented in order to maintain the fish population. Through current fishing rights agreements, Micronesians are clearly being exploited.
Perhaps most importantly to maintaining their standard of living, compact funds, while still available, should be invested in sustainable infrastructure projects like the wave-powered generators on Kosrae. Each major island should develop its own source of renewable energy, whether through waves, wind or solar power. There is no reason why Micronesians should still be using diesel generators to provide what amounts to exorbitantly priced energy, as this also severely diminishes what can be spent in other sectors of the economy.
Conclusions
Although I provide several suggestions for how I believe Micronesia should address some of its many problems moving forward, I feel compelled to emphasize that it must be the people of these island nations who assume control of their own futures. That is, as an American, I hope I have made it clear that is not my business to tell Micronesians how they should be governed or what their economies should look like. Rather, I merely offer the perspective of an informed outsider regarding these issues. However, considering that the compact funds that these nations currently depend upon will most likely disappear ten years from now, the time to be investing in the future of this region is now. Steps must be taken in order to achieve some semblance of self-sufficiency, because there are very few alternatives.
Micronesia truly is, in many ways, a paradise on earth, but this idyllic way of life is being spoiled by consumerism. To say that their poverty is only “moderate” because most Micronesians live on slightly more than two dollars a day is to ignore the fact that two dollars buys so very little on these remote islands. It also fails to take into account that what an individual can afford may in fact be less important than a basic consideration of what services their government can provide. In other words, I think that the functionality of the government may be a better measure of economic viability than individual income.
That is to say that poverty, in this sense, is not a lack of wealth so much as it is a dissolution of any social concern for individual welfare. We must remember that this was once a major component of their civilization, but in recent decades, competition has largely taken the place of cooperation. The free market has supplanted actual freedom. Meanwhile, capitalism has taught Micronesians that any decrease in their standard of living is a direct result of their own lack of entrepreneurial spirit. If they are any worse off now than they were when the U.S. first occupied these islands, so the assumption goes, it is because they have proven themselves too lazy to invest in private industry. This is clearly a flawed logic that has been absolutely detrimental to daily life on these Pacific islands, and this rationale must be abandoned if they are to salvage any discernible hope for their future.
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