Stealing Pacific soils to enrich western farmers

Swimming with Sharks Chapter 7.1

‘All our lands on the hill

‘No longer can be used

‘Will become home of craters and rocks’

- Nauruan song

Growing up in Hawke’s Bay I knew the sound of top dressing planes dumping super phosphate across Te Mata hills, then heavily sheep-farmed. I wonder how much of it is in the award winning grapes that have replaced the sheep. 

No one ever mentioned that we robbed the phosphate from Pacific Islanders. Without Nauru and Banaba and their soils, New Zealand would be a Third World economy.

As a young Evening Post reporter, I tried to see the government phosphate files but Muldoon refused; its dark secret made the nation wealthy. By hand and by pick, by wheelbarrow and truckload, the British Phosphate Commission (BPC), owned in equal shares by the Australian, British and New Zealand Governments, scrapped Nauru’s soil and shipped it south. Once known as Pleasant Island for its thick jungle, now it is a lunar landscape of tall bleached white coral pinnacles.

Nauru, before western farmers found it. Photo National Library

New Zealanders find justification with a lie and with a nifty piece of racism. The lie is that we paid a fair price. We justify it with a tortured piece of logic that says that when, finally, we paid a commercial price to Nauru, their corrupt leaders blew the money and fell in with the Russian Mafia. It was as well we did not pay them more; Nauruans could not be trusted with money.