August 20, 1998

By Michael Field

When it comes to mysteries Micronesia, scene next week of a Pacific leaders summit, has more than its share.

   On one atoll they have the world's highest rates of colour-blindness, on another they invented central banking and near here in pre-historic times people built a huge temple and canal complex which had been abandoned by the time Europeans showed up.

   Next week the South Pacific Forum summit of 16-nations will meet here on this island of Pohnpei, one of the four states making up the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a nation with serious problems.

   Micronesians are killing themselves on a diet of junk Western food and children, despite a lush environment here, have the worst rates of vitamin A deficiency in the world. Spousal violence is sharply increasing, both in numbers and severity and the economy, never healthy, is collapsing.

   FSM is composed of 607 small islands extending over a large area of the central Pacific. Four states -- Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap -- make up the federation. The population is estimated at 106,000, mostly of Micronesian origin.

   FSM became independent in 1991. It was first colonised by the Spanish, then the Germans and the Japanese. The US occupied it after the war and it became a United Nations Trust Territory.

   Yap has long featured in "Believe it or Not" trivia for its huge stone money which was actually quarried in Palau, to the south. Chiefs would commission the minting of a coin and men would sail their to get it. Some of the money never made it, falling from the boats into what is actually the world's deepest ocean. But in a kind of central banking the chiefs who knew where the coin was still honour its existence and pay traditional debts with it.

   The ruins of Nan Madol near here speak of another kind if mania, similar to Rapanui or Easter Island where chiefs ultimately destroyed the environment by building hundreds of moai or busts.

   Around 1100 to 1200 AD chiefs began building the city with basalt which had come from volcanoes which had dried into hexagonal columns. Each averages around 50 tonnes and was taken from a quarry by raft to the site. Micronesian legends suggest darkness and violence associated with Nan Madol which these days is visited by the few tourists who make it here, and avoided by locals.

   On the atoll of Pingelap around 10 percent of the suffer achromatopsia -- true colour blindness. Worldwide achromatopsia affects only one person in every 33,000. Its sufferers have a painful hypersensitivity to the light.

   New York neurologist Oliver Sacks the problem came about as the result of a typhoon around 1775 which killed all but 20 people. He said the population quickly built up -- "it was heroic breeding with perhaps a degree of incest" -- but the surviving paramount chief, was carrying the recessive gene for colour blindness.

   Pohnpeians are also heavy consumers of sakau, the local form of kava. It has produced psychomotor retardation in much of the male population -- which can be seen in the slow driving common here. People also suffer ichthyosis or "fish skin" from the sakau.

   The modern diet here is fatal, claims Doctor Rod Jackson of the University of Auckland School of Medicine, said.

   Micronesians eat corned beef, turkey tails, chicken frames and mutton flaps to almost the total exclusion of fresh foods.

   "The pigs are better fed than the people," he said after completing a World Health Organisation study.

    "We are dumping these cheap foods onto them, and while they like them, we are exploiting them. Dietary genocide might be a bit extreme but people are literally eating themselves to death...."

   The US State Department in its human rights report on FSM says spousal abuse and child neglect is rising here as traditional extended families change.

   "Effective prosecution of such offenses is rare," the report said.

Copyright: Michael Field