you are saying to the world, we believe there are some substantial oil deposits offshore in seychelles. and you ve signed an agreement with a canadian company we will give licences to explore 500 million barrels or more of oil unless you give us money now. that s a form of blackmail. no, no. what we are doing, we need to know what we have. this is normalfor a country. we re an independent state, so it s important for us to know what resources seychelles has. but would you. you re the president of the country. would you give the green light for a massive offshore oil exploration programme in seychelles? yes, but let us also look at what the west is doing. with respect, can you just answer
and let me say, ok, you will come to victoria, you will come to the seychelles. 0k, we have ghettos where the drug trafficking is happening, but we are intervening. you say you re intervening and you ve given me a few examples, but you do seem to vacillate between punishment and treatment. sometimes you emphasise a very tough stand on punishment and sentencing, and at other times you ve got yourfree methadone programme that you re handing out to anybody who wants it. right now, what works best for you? but this is where, again, just like any other country, you ve got to go after the traffickers. but we ve also got to realise that addiction is a medical condition. when somebody is addicted, you cannot put that person in prison, you ve got to treat that person. and the methadone programme is simply to allow those people to be able to do a day s work, for example.
when the world talks about africa, they don t really pay attention to the sids. and yet, the sids of africa are the ones that are doing very well. when you look at the mo ibrahim index, for example, mauritius is first, seychelles is second, cape verde s third. so you have three sids that are doing extremely well, but the focus is on mainland africa. but isn t that, in a sense, part of the point? you are doing relatively well. i believe your per capita income is over $10,000, which in african terms is pretty remarkable, and you re very small. your population is hovering around 100,000. so in the end, how can you expect to have a meaningful voice on the world stage? well, even though we re doing well, the thing is, because we are island states, we are most exposed to
so these two examples of our two main industries clearly show the vulnerability of our situation, plus the climate change situation. for example, we do not have a plastic factory in seychelles. yet on all our islands, on aldabra, some of our youth, some years back, when they took to do a clean up, they collected over 20,000 tonnes. i appreciate the challenges you have, but with respect, mr president, you re not likely to get your way on getting this vulnerability index and making sure that you, with other developing economies, benefit from the climate change loss and damage cash that may be coming from the rich world. you won t get it if you, to put it bluntly, really annoy your fellow emerging countries. you said recently, the west prefers
climate change, and therefore we are most vulnerable. so when we talk about states graduating from a developing country to a high income, and of course, once this happens, then we do not have access to concessionary funding. and this is why we, as sids, are fighting for the mvi to be introduced so that we can have access and keep on the development. well, you ve touched upon something which i know for you is a very big deal. that is the fact that at the moment, the way the rules work, you re sort of too rich to qualify for the concessionary funding, which comes for those poor and developing nations which are being right now impacted by climate change. and we ll get to your proposals on funding in a minute. but before we do, are you in danger of exaggerating just how much the seychelles is going to be damaged by climate change and sea level rise?