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Comoros Comoros as Client State: The Economics of Abdallah
President Abdallah generally put his personal interests
ahead
of national interests in making economic policy. The
result was
the creation of a client state whose meager and
unpredictable
cash crop earnings were supplemented with increasing
infusions of
foreign aid.
Throughout the 1980s, export earnings from Comoros'
four main
cash crops--vanilla, ylang-ylang, cloves, and
copra--experienced
a wrenching sequence of booms and collapses because of
weather
and market factors, or else steadily dwindled. The
regime's
principal form of response was to apply the president's
considerable diplomatic skills to developing an extensive
network
of governments and international organizations willing to
extend
loans and donate aid. The main suppliers were France,
South
Africa, the EC, the conservative Arab states, the
World Bank (see Glossary)
and related organs, and regional financial
institutions
such as the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa
and the
African Development Bank. Some assistance went to projects
of
indisputable value, such as efforts to create independent
news
media and improve telephone communications with the
outside
world. Much of the aid, however, was questionable--for
example,
loans and grants to help the republic meet the payroll for
its
oversized civil service. Other more plausible projects,
such as
the protracted development of a seaport at the town of
Mutsamudu,
construction of paved ring roads linking each island's
coastal
settlements, and the building of power stations,
nonetheless
tended to be instances of placing the cart before the
horse. That
is, capital-intensive improvements to infrastructure had
not been
coordinated with local development projects; hence,
little, if
any, domestic commerce existed to benefit from road
networks,
electrical power, and world-class port facilities. The
importation of huge quantities of building materials and
construction equipment provided immediate benefits to
importexport firms in the islands, of which Établissements
Abdallah et
Fils was the largest. In the meantime, the projects were
of
little immediate use to Comorans and were likely to go
underused
for years to come.
Throughout the Abdallah period, rice imports drained as
much
as 50 percent of Comoran export earnings. Projects to
increase
food self-sufficiency, as one observer noted, "fail[ed] to
respond to the largesse" provided by international
sponsors such
as the European Development Fund and the International
Fund for
Agricultural Development. The president joined with
vanilla
growers in resisting international pressure to divert
vanillaproducing land to the cultivation of corn and rice for
domestic
consumption. He also declined to heed World Bank advice to
impose
tariffs and domestic taxes on imported rice. Abdallah's
importexport firm was heavily involved in vanilla exports, as
well as
in the importation of Far Eastern rice at three times its
price
at the source.
Abdallah's firm, whose co-owners included Denard and
Kalfane
and Company, a Pakistani concern, also profited from
managing the
importation of materials used by South African firms in
developing tourist hotels. Little of the material used in
building these resorts was of Comoran origin. Also, once
completed, the resorts would be almost entirely owned and
managed
by non-Comorans. Although tourism, mainly by South
Africans who
were unwelcome in other African resorts, was widely
considered
the only promising new industry in Comoros, Abdallah
guided its
development so that resorts benefited few Comorans other
than
himself and his associates.
Under Abdallah's tutelage, the Comoran economy finished
the
1980s much as it had started the decade--poor,
underdeveloped,
and dependent on export earnings from cash crops of
unpredictable
and generally declining value. The critical difference,
with
enormous implications for the republic's capacity to have
some
say in its own destiny, was its new status as a nation
abjectly
in debt. By 1988, the last full year of the Abdallah
regime, 80
percent of annual public expenditures were funded by
external aid
(see Economy
, this ch.).
Data as of August 1994
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