Ocean swallowing Pacific islands

AUCKLAND - As diplomats debate environmental protocols and scientists question whether the Pacific is rising, seven families on a forgotten atoll are homeless as an otherwise beautiful piece of the Pacific puts on a dress rehearsal for global warming.

The Independent newspaper in Port Moresby says Papua New Guinea (PNG) has no alternative but to move the 1,500 people of Carteret Island as the sea moves relentlessly in.

They are sharing the fate of a small civilisation of singing Polynesians at Takuu, 170 km to the east, whose community of 2,500 is also sinking.

Carteret and Takuu, in addition to being part of PNG's long war-torn province of Bougainville, have to fight a violent form of nature, being at the intersection of two giant fault lines which routinely produce earthquakes of up to magnitudes seven and eight.

The limited infrastructure is seldom damaged but the islands themselves pay heavily.

Six islands form the almost circular Carteret atoll, about 16 km in diameter.

The Independent said the Port Moresby government had been urged to take immediate action to resettle the islanders.

In the last fortnight, seven families were left homeless and food gardens destroyed as high seas swept through the islands.

The gardens are the key to survival on Pacific atolls: carefully crafted compost pits are used to grow root crops. Once the sea gets in, they are ruined.

The Independent said the authorities on Bougainville stressed there was no alternative but to relocate 1,500 islanders into a safe area on Bougainville.

But Bougainville is at a critical stage of negotiations to end a 12-year conflict on the island.

Mr Ephraim Eminomi of the Buka District Services office, which monitors Carteret and the other outlying islands, said high waves destroyed seven houses, washing away shoreline and food gardens.

He said a seawall had been washed away. And Iolasa Island, which still has people living on it, has been cut in half by the rising sea.

'The lives of the people are at stake as the ongoing problem worsens by the day, month and year,' he told The Independent.

'Coupled with the high-seas problem also is over population on these islands.

'Regardless of all the worthwhile efforts put in by the government and concerned authorities and people, it will be in the best interest of everyone if the islanders are relocated.'

Life has turned into a nightmare on Takuu, whose people have had little to do with the outside world and thus retained their culture.

Ethnomusicologist Richard Moyle, who is writing the first ethnology of Takuu, says each adult on the island can sing more than 1,000 songs from memory.

The sinking islands there have seen gardens destroyed and a growing threat of starvation for a people who have seldom needed imported food.

Mr Moyle fears they are doomed, but for the people themselves their fate is beyond comprehension.

He said: 'The older people said they wanted to stay and I asked them what would happen when the island was underwater. They said 'I will die'.'

--AFP