Category Archives: Cook Islands

Pacific states face instability, hunger and slow road to Covid recovery: Dame Meg Taylor

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While the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has so far spared the Pacific, its economies are in free-fall, the region’s chief diplomat warns

Beyond the health and economic crises of Covid-19, the global pandemic has the potential to cause political instability and undermine state security across the Pacific, the region’s chief diplomat has warned.

Dame Meg Taylor, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, said the region’s economies were struggling with the virus-induced shocks, and a prolonged crisis could worsen existing problems of hunger, poor healthcare, and state fragility.

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Coronavirus in the Pacific: weekly briefing

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Covid-19-related developments throughout the Pacific Islands

The total number of Covid-19 cases across the Pacific stands at 314, with new cases reported this week in New Caledonia, Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.

New Zealand is under increasing pressure, both internally and from across the region, to consider Pacific countries as part of its proposed travel ‘bubble’, alongside, or even in place of, Australia. The foreign minister, Winston Peters, initially rejected including Pacific island nations, but later backtracked.

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Cook Islands: manager of world’s biggest marine park says she lost job for backing sea mining moratorium

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Environmentalist Jacqueline Evans says she was dismissed from the Marae Moana for urging caution on deep-sea mining

The public champion of the world’s largest marine reserve – the Cook Islands’ Marae Moana – has said she lost her job managing it because she supported a moratorium on seabed mining in the Pacific.

Six months ago, Jacqueline Evans won the Goldman Environmental prize – the world’s foremost environmental award – for her work establishing Marae Moana (meaning “sacred ocean”), which covers the Cook Islands’ entire exclusive economic zone of more than 1.9m sq km.

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Renaming the Cook Islands could be a vital step towards true independence | Nalini Mohabir

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It’s a self-governing country with Polynesian heritage and a great seafaring history. So why is it named after British explorer?

Fifty-four years after independence, the Cook Islands, is considering a name change. Named after Captain Cook, the Pacific islands, located between New Zealand and Hawaii, comprise 15 Polynesian islands, each with their own pre-colonial names and histories and complicated dynamics in the present. They are not the colonial fantasies of remote island adventures or tropical sexualities, and more than tourist destinations.

If you thought decolonisation in the Pacific was a mid-20th-century moment that ended with political independence, you would be wrong. Decolonisation is a continuing undoing of the legacies of colonialism. It involves re-examining names and categories, but it is not always about going back to the past to claim some authentic identity. Hence, Danny Mataroa, chair of the Cook Islands name change committee, has suggested a name that encompasses Christian faith (which arrived after colonialism) and Māori heritage (which predates colonialism).

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