Melbourne scholars, comprising Dr. Simon Batterbury from OEP, Prof. Marcia Langton, Dr. Christian Kull (Monash) and Frédérique Lehoux (Oxfam Australia) attended the first ever conference on ‘Rurality and Sustainable Development in New Caledonia‘ in Poindimié, New Caledonia from October27-Nov 01 2008. New Caledonia, a French Pacific island dependency east of Queensland, is a beautiful place and popular with tourists, but also it is a serious mining economy; the main island, Grande Terre, produces a substantial percentage of the world’s nickel. It also has a colonial history that parallels Australia’s: the original Melanesian inhabitants were partly displaced by French settlers from the mid 1800s and efforts were made to acculturate them according to francophone norms, through missionary activity and schooling. After decades of uneasy ethnic relations and several revolts, in the 1980s there was open resistance from some indigenous Kanaks to continued cultural and economic dominance by France. retaliations and violence followed. Although much calmer today following political concessions by France in the late 1980s and 1990s, the islanders are due to vote, sometime in the next few years, on whether to split completely from French governance. France still provides substantial financial and administrative support to the islands, and controls foreign policy and law. Lobbying is going on on both sides of this political debate.
Rather later than the rest of the world, New Caledonia is now considering how to meet its environmental obligations (France’s Pacific territories were exempted from the Kyoto Protocol, and only in 2008 has New Caledonia’s reef been included as a UNESCO World Heritage site). Previous mining enterprises have been very destructive, leading to pollution of water catchments and outflows of nickel-rich waters into the lagoon and reef (the second longest reef in the world). The nickel smelter in the capital, Noumea, used more electricity than the entire city to extract nickel from the mined deposits, and air pollution is noticeable.
‘Sustainable development’ in New Caledonia has unique features. Because the islands have a low population and mining is totally dominant as an economic activity, there is little prospect of diversifiying away from it. While subsistence farming maintains its role, as elsewhere in Melanesia, commercial agriculture has never had a large enough market to provide sustainabel livelihoods across the islands. The huge subsidies given to New Caledonia by France, distort prices and wages. Some goods that coudl be sources locally or in neighbouring countries travels vast distances, often from France, to arrive at the stores. Tarrifs prevent many imports from nearer neighbours. This is unsustainable, considering the carbon emissions resulting from long distance air and sea transport. The advantage of the small population is that there has been little urbanisation or industrial/residential development. Energy is supplied by fossil fuels and hydro power, with small signs of other renewable energy projects now emerging. But only in recent years has there been any serious environmental protest movement, to push such ventures, or a concern by the government to conform urgently to international agreements on environment and sustainability.
Some Kanak people have responded to their own sense of marginalisation by pushing for construction of an economic ‘development’ pole away from the capital city, Noumea (which is dominanted by white Caledonians, and European settlers). In the Province du Nord, which has partial devolution to a Kanak-dominanted administration but a lack of income opportunities, a huge nickel mine and smelter at Koniambo is being built, with ownership split between the Province and Xstrata, a Swiss mining company. We toured the site. Environmental controls appear much better than in previous decades. However the reef has been breached and a hill cut away in order to construct a port to transport the nickel and first to smelt it. Local villagers are not happy about lack of compensation and disruption to their traditional livelihoods; and a planned influx of thousands of mineworkers will bring comparisons with less than ’sustainable” enterprises elsewhere in Melanesia. Also nickel resides in the top strata of the hills; these will, as elsewhere on the island, be cut away.
The key tension is this. To provide jobs and ‘development’ in this isolated and historically underdeveloped north of the island, the Provincial government has followed the approach taken by the more developed (and Europeanised) southern Province: it has opted for mining as the engine of growth (and some tourism support-it owns a hotel chain). Mining is not usually at the top of lists of ’sustainable’ economic activities, as Colin Filer (ANU) pointed out at the meeting. But mining is at least being done on the terms of the Northern Province and its representatives, since it controls many aspects of the project, and local employment is seen as a priority. Marcia Langton stressed at the meeting the urgent need for negotiations between mine companies and indigenous people, and for these to take a much more proactive form. In this regard, some of the recent agreements made with Aboriginal people in Northern Australia seem far ahead of those achieved in New Caledonia. We learned from Raphaël Mapu, vice-président of the Comité Reebu-Nu, of the struggle of Kanak people around a second and larger mine site, Goro Nickel in the south of the island, to achieve satisfactory settlements and compensation for loss of land and marine resources. These were only agreed in 2008 after several years of protest.
The organisers, particulalry Gilles Pestana (UNC) and Jean-Michel Sourisseau (IAC) are to be congratulated for their substantial effort to lay on a multicultural conference permitting frank discussion of issues that have hitherto rarely left the islands, or have bypassed them.
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