Tributes have flowed for the late Dan McGarry, who was for many years the editor of the Vanuatu Daily Post. McGarry died in the last week of March, at the age of only 62. He had been travelling in Papua New Guinea when he felt ill. He was evacuated to Brisbane and underwent a heart bypass operation, but died shortly afterwards.
McGarry's reporting honoured the complexity of Melanesia. He was suspicious of theorists and intellectual models, and his bullshit detector beeped when he talked with me. I'd gotten in touch with Dan after a visit to Vanuatu. I was excited about the economic cooperatives that I'd seen there. They seemed like an attempts to find an alternative to Western capitalist forms of development, and also to compete with Chinese businesses.
Scholars of Tonga like Niko Besnier have shown how entrepreneurs failed there in the 1990s and early 2000s. The business model these entrepreneurs were using clashed with local culture. They couldn't accumulate capital because they were obliged to share income through kin networks, and to give relatives freebies. Chinese took over their failed businesses, and today largely control the Tongan economy. I'd found several scholarly studies of ni-Vanuatu cooperatives, and then when I visited cooperatives on the ground they seemed to be doing well. McGarry's replies to my queries about the cooperative model in Vanuatu were like a tall glass of cold water.
He warned me not to accept too readily the surface appearance of success. Vanuatu governments and NGOs had tried to support cooperatives by giving them loans. But, he explained, this had led to a serious problem. More than a few 'Potemkin cooperatives' had been set up. The people behind them wanted loans, but didn't have a serious business plan. The money they received would not be paid back. There were genuine and successful cooperatives, but corrupt cooperatives were a huge problem.
McGarry didn't want me to abandon my research. He didn't dismiss the idea that cooperatives might be the key to Vanuatu's economic future. But he wanted me to think and research more carefully. He was acutely conscious of the way outsiders brought their own ideological hangups and agendas to Vanuatu. It wasn't just left-wing romantics like myself who were in danger of missing the facts on the ground. In 2018 he skewered a right-wing Aussie minister.
McGarry had been to the southern island of Tanna, to look at work on a road funded by China. Australian minister for the Pacific Concetta Fierravanti-Wells had attacked the 'roads to nowhere' China was building in the Pacific, saying that they were 'useless'. She had insisted that the roads funded by Beijing were poorly located and constructed, and claimed that much of China's aid money was lost to corruption. McGarry did not simply dismiss Fierravanti-Wells' allegations, just as he did not simply reject my take on cooperatives.
Instead he insisted on nuance. Yes, he conceded, China had a 'spotty' record on aid. Some projects had indeed been 'useless'. But the road on Tanna was an enormous improvement on the muddy, vertiginous tracks that had kept many southern Tannese villages isolated. McGarry described four wheel drive journeys over those tracks vividly. He remembered vehicles that had 'metal cages over the back, so that people don’t get thrown out of the truck as it lurches back and forth', and 'bridges that consisted of bare logs laid over a creek'.
McGarry went on to note that some Australian aid projects had had their own difficulties. His article was an attempt to introduce some nuance to discussions about aid that had been made dogmatic by geopolitics. Politicians and diplomats had an interest in celebrating their own side's aid projects and denigrating or downplaying the projects of the other side. And in both China and Australia, some academics had come to identify too closely with one side, so that their ability to judge events on the ground was impaired.
McGarry helped build the Vanuatu Daily Post into a corrective to this sort of political dogma. The paper was widely trusted because it refused to pick a side in the struggle between the big powers for influence in Vanuatu and the Pacific. It was on the side of facts. A year after he attacked Concetta Fierravanti-Wells Vanuatu's government tried to kick McGarry out of the country. He had published articles alleging dodgy links between some local politicians and China. After an outcry McGarry resumed his work in Port Vila. It is a tragedy that that work has now ended.
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