From squash to space tourism

Visitors to the Pacific islands can easily get the impression that local tastebuds are somehow different to those elsewhere in the world.

The favourite local vegetables - selected because of their tolerance of sandy atoll soil, and subsequently enshrined in the island diet - are taro, cassava, manioc, and yams.

To the outsider it can often seem like all too many ways of dressing up dry starch. So the sight of stacked crates of green, ripe pumpkin squashes by the roadsides of Tonga's biggest and most fertile island Tongatapu comes as a surprise.

Squashes are as unpopular with Tongans as the country's native vegetables are with outsiders. Such dietary niceties matter less when the squash's role in Tonga's economy is worked out. At times, more than half of the island kingdom's export earnings come from the crop, and the figure rarely falls below a third.

Almost the entire crop goes to Japan, where it makes up 96% of Tonga's exports. The other 4% comes mostly from tuna and mozuku seaweed, a delicacy grown in Japan's southern Okinawa islands until May and in Tonga until November.

Such dependence on a single crop seems risky in a world of wildly fluctuating prices, and indeed Tonga's harvest of squash has been down nearly 50% this year, as a result of poor weather and international price competition.

But the country has already survived a similar collapse in the price of vanilla beans, and many smallholders are already turning towards growing kava, the mildly sedative root used to make the Pacific's most popular drink.

Tonga's economy has never really made it off the ground in the manner of its larger, richer neighbours such as Fiji and Samoa. Foreign aid is still an important component of the budget, and a significant portion of the country's income comes from the third of Tongans who live overseas. Tongans in New Zealand, America and Australia send home remittance money that is worth around T$80m (£27m) a year.

For many in this scattered archipelago, the relative lack of success is not a big deal. Fed by tropical heat and monsoon rains, the country's fields produce more than enough to feed even the famously statuesque Tongans, and the surrounding ocean yields an equally rich catch.

Despite a per-head gross domestic product of just T$5,182 a year, Tonga has little of the outright poverty suffered by countries such as Indonesia and Jamaica which, on paper at least, ought to be richer.

Part of this is down to the country's unique land laws, which operate as a sort of informal welfare state. Every male Tongan over the age of 16 is entitled to a plot of land, meaning that most of the population is able to subsist on their own labour in times of low employment. The booming population has put serious pressure on the system, but smallholders still provide the overwhelming majority of those exported squashes.

But not everyone is so keen on Tonga's enlightened land laws. Foreign investors are immediately scared off by the fact that any large building development must be placed over a patchwork of leasehold plots, each of which must be negotiated separately. Others point out that, with that one-third of the population living abroad, a decent slice of agricultural land must be going to waste.

Many in Tonga are keen to change the outlook of the country, lifting it from its current position as a sleepy agricultural backwater and putting it into the fast lane of the Pacific economy. But attempts to do so have, more often than not, tended towards the farcical.

There was the plan to import crude oil from Iran, refine it in Tonga and ship it around the Pacific - a scheme that fell down when it was pointed out that plenty of better-located countries already operated their own oil distribution networks. Or the proposal to take America's used car tyres and burn them to generate energy, an idea that fell foul of both the environmental and scientific lobbies.

Worse still was a proposal from a Korean Christian cult to invest in a bogus scheme to turn seawater into natural gas, which depended on a miracle machine that would achieve the chemically impossible feat of extracting a gallon of natural gas from every five gallons of sea water.

More recently, the government lost T$20m on a proposal, put up by an American best known for selling magnets to cure back pain, to sell life insurance to the terminally ill. In a bizarre twist, Jesse Bogdonoff, the American businessman behind the scheme, had previously (and prophetically) been appointed to the title of court jester by King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV.

So by the time Crown Prince Tupouto'a came along with a proposal to make the island nation the cellular communications capital of the world last year, regular watchers of Tonga's economic life knew what to expect.

Sure enough, the hoped-for broadband mobile network - delivering television, internet and telephone information over a wireless link - is yet to materialise, and Tonga is still largely dependant on a pre-digital pulse telephone network.

The country also joined several other usefully-monikered Pacific nations in looking to its internet domain name as a revenue-raiser. But like Tuvalu (.tv), Niue (.nu) and Micronesia (.fm), Tonga's .to domain name failed to take off as local entrepreneurs hoped.

The latest wheeze has been introduced thanks to Californian space tourism company InterOrbital Systems, who announced in January that they would be using the small island of 'Eua off Tongatapu's eastern coast as a launchpad for T$2m week-long trips into space.

Would-be space tourists pay their fare in instalments into an escrow account, from which InterOrbital will withdraw interest until the first expected flight in 2005. Given Tonga's history of failed business schemes, no one's uprooting their squash crop to make room for a runway just yet.