AUCKLAND (AFP) May 28, 2003
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is trying to convince two small communities of Polynesians that they have to quit their atoll homes as they become overwhelmed by the Pacific Ocean.
Emergency food supplies are to be sent later this week amidst conflicting reports on the plight of the 2,000 people on the Tulun or Carteret Islands and the 400 on Takuu or Mortlock Islands, northeast of PNG's Bougainville Island.
Visual evidence suggests the atolls are sinking, although the reason is not clear.
"The crops are being affected by the salt water," Eric Ani of the Disaster and Emergency Management Office told AFP from Port Moresby.
"We have to do something drastic to make the people aware that it is no longer okay to live there, regardless of how long they have lived there. They must move for humanitarian reasons."
Emergency food supplies were to be sent this week, he said, although he denied local reports of starvation on the islands that have no regular communications links with the outside world.
"It is not comfortable for them," he said. "They have lived on coconuts and fish."
PNG wants to move the Polynesian people who live on atolls never more than five metres (16 feet) -- and usually much less -- above sea-level to Bougainville, a rugged volcanic 10,660 square kilometre (4,100 square mile) island of 175,000 Melanesians.
A decade long civil war ended there three years ago.
But Ani said it would be hard to get the people to move.
"The people are Polynesian. Bougainvillians on the main island are Melanesian. We will have to send a technical team to make an assessment of the island and perhaps to (generate) some awareness and advocacy to make the people aware that they must leave the place and go somewhere else."
University of Auckland's Richard Moyle, an ethnomusicologist who is writing the first, and what may be the last ethnology of the people of Takuu, believes the unique culture, which may have been there for as long as 3,000 years, is on the verge of extinction.
The community have over 1000 songs they can sing from memory and there are fears the choral tradition will go with the waves.
Takuu is an extraordinary Pacific story: geographically it is in Melanesia but its people are Polynesians. An epidemic hit it in the 1870s and just 13 people survived.
In 1896 a Samoan-American woman, "Queen" Emma Coe, bought it for four axes and 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) of tobacco. Under Imperial German protection she had all the trees chopped down and replaced with coconuts, and she imported New Irelanders to work the plantations.
Ani said the ocean was not physically overwhelming people of the atolls yet.
"The Carteret Island is a low atoll island and the strong winds and the salt water have washed and saturated the ground and they are not able to grow any crops," he said.
Attempts had been made in the past to move people and some had gone to Bougainville, only to return to their atolls.
He said the PNG government needed to do some advocacy to "get the people used to the idea that they have to move."
The problems had been growing for sometime and Ani said he did not have the scientific background to say what was happening.
"It probably is because of the effects of the greenhouse (warming). There is talk of islands sinking everywhere in the world. We would not be isolated."
The Australian National Tidal Facility for the last decade has monitored sea-level changes across the Pacific, but they have said they do not have enough long range data to say what is happening definitely.
Their tide measuring station on PNGs Manus Island, 1100 kilometresmiles) to the west of the atolls, has measured a 8.2mm (0.24 inch) per year rise in sea level based on seven years of recording.
The Solomon Islands station, 750 kilometres (465 miles) south, has recorded 6.2mm (0.24 inch) rise a year over eight years and Nauru, 1200 kilometresmiles) northeast, has recorded 5.6 mm (0.22 inch) per year over nine years.
The area is at a junction of the Australasian-Indian tectonic plates which produce a large number of major earthquakes. Some experts believe the quakes are responsible for the sinking of some islands and the rising of others.
All rights reserved. © 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.
Post Courier