Western Samoa’s 20 years

Press, 29 May 1982, Page 14

Western Samoa’s 20 years

Western Samoa will celebrate 20 years of independence next week in a time of grave financial and constitutional problems. The country gained independence from New Zealand in 1962 after a period of rule which had lasted from World War I when New Zealand took over the country from Germany. The constitutional problems, which derive from the recent election, may prove easier to solve than the country’s financial problems. These include a $3.6 million debt that Nauru says is owed to it by Western Samoa for a Boeing 737 airliner. In the week after Western Samoa celebrates its independence an International Monetary Fund team will visit the country to see what can be done to rescue it from its dire financial straits.

One problem is that Western Samoa imports by value about five times as much as it exports. This difference between expenditure and income is largely made up by aid from a number of countries, including New Zealand. The standard of living has risen over the last few years in Western Samoa. Since Western Samoa is one of the poorest countries in the world, such an improvement must be welcomed. Not so welcome is the fact that while some of the aid that is going into the country has been used to raise the living standards, it has not been used sufficiently to establish projects that might in time provide more employment or earn more foreign exchange.

If the I.M.F. team is to be useful, it will highlight the need for productive investment, better management, and the seizing of every opportunity to earn foreign exchange. Western Samoans have been tending to give up catching fish in the lagoons and to import Japanese tinned fish. Such a shift in habit may not be of much consequence in the economy, but it hardly exemplifies a strong desire to achieve selfsufficiency.

Western Samoa exports mainly copra, bananas, coffee and cocoa. Its cocoa is fine and is used for flavouring thfe cocoa from

countries that produce vastly greater amounts of cocoa. World markets have been particularly bad for copra and coffee. Production in all of Western Samoa’s main crops has fallen, mostly because of a drop in prices. The sharp rises in the price of oil have also hurt Western Samoa’s economy. Added to this has been inefficiency in the biggest corporation in the islands, the Western Samoa Trusts Estate Corporation. This organisation was founded by the Germans, was taken over by New Zealand, and is now run by the Western Samoan Government. It owns about one-eighth of the land area of Western Samoa. This corporation has been performing badly. The Prime Minister who has just been elected, Mr Vaai Kolpne, has said that an improvement in the performance of the corporation is one of his first goals. New Zealand takes particular care of the Cook Islands, the Tokelaus, and Niue because the people of these islands are New Zealand citizens. Its annual aid to these amounts to about $5OO a head. Western Samoans come next as beneficiaries of New Zealand’s direct aid, which amounted last year to about $4.5 million. The downturn in the New Zealand economy has meant that fewer Western Samoans come to' New Zealand for work and send home some of the money they earn here. This has also drastically affected Western Samoa’s economy.

The new Prime Minister in Western Samoa is treating the country’s economic plight seriously, and it must be hoped that he will succeed. Even if he improves the performance of the economy, Western Samoa will still depend heavily on aid for many years, perhaps indefinitely. Sooner or later, those who give aid to the South Pacific are going to have to tackle head on the problem of what to do with economies that may never become self-supporting. As Western Samoa looks back over 20 years and its political independence, it also has cause to wonder about its future and its economic dependence on others.