Kiribati President Purchases ‘Worthless’ Resettlement Land as Precaution Against Rising Sea

You can count the inhabitants of this isolated, tidy village of multi-coloured houses and flower bushes among global warming’s first victims – but not in the usual sense.
They are descendants of labourers from the Solomon Islands who came to Fiji to work on the coconut plantations in the 19th century. In 1947, they were invited to move onto a large one called the Natoavatu Estate that the Anglican Church once inherited and were told they could stay there indefinitely as long as they practiced the Anglican faith.
In late May, the Church sold most of the 2331.3-hectare estate to the island nation of Kiribati, leaving the 270 villagers, who said they used 283 hectares to feed themselves, with only 125 hectares.
“We can’t live on just 300 acres [125 hectares],” said the village headman, Sade Marika.
Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, said he bought land in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable.
“We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” he told the Associated Press.
For years, Tong has claimed in climate change conferences and in interviews that sea-level rise was already claiming a heavy toll on his people, eroding beaches, destroying buildings and crops, forcing the evacuation of a village and wiping out an entire island.
His views are echoed by Conservation International, a large NGO based near Washington, D.C., on whose board Tong sits. The residents of “Kiribati, where the effects of rising sea levels already are being felt, [are] on the front lines of climate change,” says its website.
In Tarawa, Kiribati’s overcrowded capital island where half the population of 103,000 lives, Tong often warns in speeches that climate change will destroy their homeland but that he is working hard to obtain compensation from the countries that caused it.
Kiribati, with a per-capita income of 1,600 dollars, receives more foreign aid per capita than any other Pacific nation.
Back in Naviavia, the Solomon Islander Anglican minister, Koroi Salacieli, complained that the Church had given him no clear notion of how many Kiribatis would be coming into their midst. He, other villagers and an outside expert agreed that the property, of which two thirds is covered by densely forested steep hills, could only support a few hundred more people.
These would need housing and lengthy training to learn how to practice Fiji’s agriculture, which involves using bullocks to plough the land. In Kiribati, there is no agriculture to speak of: rice, canned meat and fresh fish form the mainstay of the diet.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/06/kiribati-president-purchases-worthless-r…