nauru
Sometimes, however, cricket and politics come together. They did – and continue to do so – in Nauru, the world’s smallest independent republic, a bizarre eight square miles of coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean. This 2004 entry doesn’t touch upon it, but in Nauru politics and cricket are absolutely inseparable. Nauru is a place like no other on earth. Its population of roughly 10,000 lives almost entirely around the coast, as the rest of the island is now a lunar-style wasteland, a forest of lumpy, grey limestone stumps that are the legacy of Nauru’s all-but-extinguished phosphate industry. Nauru made a fortune from the millennium’s worth of bird droppings that covered the island, but unfortunately it started running out in the 1990s and was all but exhausted by 2006. Nauru depended almost exclusively on phosphate income and, despite winning an eight-figure payout in 1989 when the nation sued Australia, New Zealand and the UK for the environmental damage caused by those nations’ companies’ mining activities, the place is on its uppers and unemployment is touching 90%. In one of international economics’ more bizarre episodes, Nauru even managed to lose £2 million in the 1990s by investing in a London musical about Leonardo da Vinci that closed after five weeks. Nauru’s bleak landscape – 90% of it is or was taken up with phosphate mining – also means fresh food is hard to come by. Nearly everything has to be imported and inevitably that means a diet of processed food high in fat and sugar. Primarily as a result of this Nauru is home to the most obese population in the world: 71% of Nauruans are clinically obese, and an astounding 94.5% of men are classed as overweight, while the island also has the world’s highest rates of diabetes. Some researchers believe this is the legacy of Nauru’s boom time: they got rich and they got fat, and culturally obesity is seen as a sign of prosperity. After the turn of the millennium Nauru, broke to the point where the national airline’s only aircraft had been repossessed, was presented with a gift horse whose dental work the Nauruan balance
Elk Stopped Play.indd 101
22/01/2014 12:08:17