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Status: Independent Republic
Area: 21 sq. km.
Population: 13,770
Unemployment rate: 90%
Rank, in GDP, among the world's nations in the early 1980s: 2
Rank today, according to the CIA World Factbook: 141
The tragic story of the island nation of Nauru begins in the digestive tracts of countless generations of sea birds. Those were the production facilities of what would become one of the world's most valuable commodities: bird shit. Or at least, it would become very valuable after being deposited in copious quantities over millions of years and reacting with the uplifted coral that formed the structure of the island to become phosphate, from whence comes phospohorus, which has many industrial and agricultural uses, including as a key component of fertilizer.
Turns out that the combination of Nauru's geology and its ecology allowed the island's phosphate deposits to become some of the largest and highest-quality deposits in the world. Mining began in the early 20th Century, when Nauru was a colony of Germany. The island would go through periods as a possession of Australia, Japan, and the UN before becoming the world's smallest independent nation in 1968 - and all the while, the mining continued.
It was an absolute bonanza. The small population of the island gained enormous wealth from its phosphate exports. By the early 1980s, the country had the second-highest per capita income in the world, after the United Arab Emirates. And, like the UAE today, the country was not ashamed to spend the wealth it derived from its
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Unfortunately, the island's good fortune did not extend to its investments of that wealth, to the extent that investments were even made:
"We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.The world's most dubious investors - from the nefarious to the clueless - saw in Nauru a likely target for their financial schemes. One advisor to the Republic of Nauru convinced the government to invest in Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a West End production that would go down as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of the London stage. The country also made various real estate investments around the world that would be gradually vaporized by corruption and mismanagement. And when the nation finally took a break from its decades-long party to look around itself, it made a discovery: the phosphate - the source of all the good times - was nearly gone, and so was the money.
"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."
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Meanwhile, mining has left the once pristine nation comprehensively denuded. A thin limn of foliage clings to the edge of the island,
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Nauru's tale is the story of a population whistling past the graveyard as it gradually depletes the finite resource on which its economy and its society depends, preferring to live extravagantly without considering what might happen when that resource inevitably disappears.
Feel free to draw your own lessons.
UPDATE: NPR's This American Life had a really good episode a little while back about Nauru. Here's the link.
9 comments:
I think I remember hearing a piece on NPR about this place, about a year ago... will try to dig that up
Yeah, you might be thinking about a This American Life episode, which was what originally planted the story of Nauru in my brain. I'll post the link.
You are absolutely right, it was on TAL....
Here it is
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