Nauru’s Rise and Fall: From Phosphate Riches to Refugee Detention Crisis

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there’s a tiny island nation called Nauru, that spans only about 8 square miles. Not too long ago, it was considered the single richest country in the world, per capita.

Today, it is one of the world’s poorest and most obese nations, and is currently best known to house a detention center rampant with human rights abuses. So what’s the story behind Nauru’s journey from riches to rags?

Well, Nauru’s stroke of luck came from its isolated position, roughly 1,800 miles north-east of Australia. As one of the only landmasses in sight, the island served as a stopping point for seagulls

around the Pacific, and on each visit, they’d do what seagulls seem to do best. After a few million years of being used as a seagull toilet, the accumulating bird poop calcified, imbuing the soil with phosphates, a very valuable, and lucrative group of elements.

Their most important use is that they help plants capture the sun’s energy so that they can grow through photosynthesis, and so phosphates are vital as a component of fertilizer.

So when Nauru gained its independence in 1968, it jumped headfirst into mining and selling it’s phosphate rich soil. Between the mid 1970s and early 1980s, the tiny island nation, of roughly 4,300 people

had far and away surpassed any oil rich, or technologically advanced country in the world in per-capita wealth. Some stats estimate that in modern currency, the island was worth $2.5 billion dollars,

or more than half a million dollars for every single man, woman, and child. Almost every societal necessity was completely free. Education, medical care, and transportation.

On top of that, Nauruans didn’t pay a penny in taxes. They didn’t have to. They were so rich that there was barely even any crime.

So what happened? Well, predictably, the phosphate ran out. And the country didn’t do a very good job of planning far into the future.

As mining became less and less lucrative, the soil, once one of the most fertile in the world, became totally barren. Little could be grown on the island, and its residents got used to importing all of their

food: mostly canned, and high in preservatives. In 2011, this unhealthy diet led to Nauru being named the single most obese country in the world.

But that wasn’t the only problem. As the government began running out of money after poor financial planning, they opened the country as an untraceable tax free banking haven, right around the time the Soviet Union

collapsed. Russian criminal syndicates took the opportunity to launder tens of billions of dollars through this unregulated financial system, feeding the increasingly corrupt government, and draining

it of resources. In a last ditch attempt at survival, Nauru reached out to the Australian government, it’s closest neighboring world power, and worked out a deal on what to do with a 70%

uninhabitable island with no source of revenue. And the solution wasn’t pretty. In the early 2000s, in exchange for Australia’s financial support, Nauru agreed to take a

few hundred Sri Lankan and Pakistani refugees, including more than three dozen children and several pregnant women, who were attempting to enter Australia by boat. This was called the “Pacific Solution”, and from then on, when any refugees approached

Australia, they were sent to squalid detention centers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, which had made a similar agreement. Conditions in these detention centers have been likened to a crumbling, poorly run prison,

with effectively no possibility for many of its detainees to leave. In fact, in 2007, the situation at the heavily overcrowded Nauru facility became so bad that it had to be shut down when they ran out of water.

But the detention center reopened in 2012, and is still operating in the same conditions today. Between 1975 and 2017, Nauru went from being the richest country per capita in the world,

to one of the five most impoverished, with a growing obesity problem, and effectively a prison for refugees. All because of bird poop.

So just how bad are these detention centers, and why is Australia going to such draconian measures to keep out immigrants and refugees? You can find out in this video to the right.

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