>Why don't the Maldivians' brother Muslim nations (many of which are rich and severely under-populated) step up to help them?
The concept of "severe underpopulation" is extremely debatable... especially in this age of environmentalism and the imperative for sustainability. A selfish desire by some countries to (over)populate themselves for reasons of internal markets/economics, or to demonstrate territorial occupation (Australia's old 'populate or perish' in the face of the perceived threat of 'overpopulated Indonesia' next door, only exacerbates the problems caused by any climate change or other disaster.
Despite the division of the planet into sovereign entities by the use of the boundaries we all study, the Earth is a single unit, so a 'tragedy of the commons' is occuring, whereby each entity populates/develops itself beyond its self-sustaining maximum, confident in the ability of other entities to provide the raw materials (eg China now or Japan in the 1930s), energy (oil!),goods, food, water (eg Singapore), or markets (imperial Britain) to support this non-internally sustainable growth. The danger is that if these goods/markets are refused, that the country needing them will take military actio (as Japan did in the 30s when the US and others restricted her raw material supplies).
Technology may be able to increase productivity, but can we rely on it doing so indefinitely, given most cities spring up around agricultural areas, the most fertile regions, and then expand their suburbs into them, destroying their own food baskets, and forcing agriculture to be imposed on lands with increasingly diminishing returns?
On another tack, Dubai's buing up of land in Pakistan recalls the former Omani enclave of Gwadar on the Baluchi coast, acquired 1784 and eventually sold to Pakistan in 1959 for GBP3 million, after Pakistan had approached the Omani Sultan about it's 'anomalous' status. As I note in my book on the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves ('Waiting for the Esquimo', p422), the coincidental(?) timing of the Pakistani approaches to Oman, and the Indo-Pakistani Nehru-Noon agreement to exchange the Cooch Behar enclaves, is intriguing and should be investigated further.
In centuries past, the European powers set up trading companies that evolved into (semi-)sovereign entities, fielding their own armies and able to shape the foreign, economic and military policies of the very states from which they had sprung. The 1800s saw these companies reach their zenith then fall back under the control of the imperial governments after overreaching themselves (eg the Indian Mutiny). Independence of the colonies in the 20th century saw much demand for territorial integrity as the newly independent states sought to develop nationalisms and conception of national unity overnight. This necessarily led to demands for the removal of anomalies of soveriegnty such as the Portuguese Goa, the Cooch Behar enclaves, and coastal fragments like Gwadar (and even arguments in the US over whether Alaska and Hawaii could qualify for statehood due to their non-contiguity to the 'Lower 48').
With Dubai companies buying up land in Pakistan to feed their own people, are we seeing the rebirth of the imperial trading companies of old, albeit out of Asia rather than Europe?
There are certainly some interesting reseach possibilities here...
Dr Brendan Whyte
Ubon Ratchathani University
THAILAND
Get news, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. Check it out!
