PINA

Moving beyond “Least Developed Country” status may be a sign of growing incomes – but not less vulnerability.

By Alexandre Dayant

In December 2027, Solomon Islands is scheduled to graduate from the United Nations’ Least Developed Country (LDC) category. It will be only the third Pacific Island country to do so after Samoa (2014) and Vanuatu (2020). In New York and Geneva, this is framed as a success story: Solomon Islands has exceeded the income and human assets thresholds in two consecutive UN reviews, enabling it to graduate.

In Honiara, however, the discussion is far more cautious.

While Solomon Islands now meets the thresholds for graduation, its economic resilience remains weak. Indicators linked to diversification, fiscal stability, governance, and climate exposure point to a country still operating with thin buffers and high vulnerability to shocks. Senior government and central bank officials have openly questioned whether the country is ready to lose access to the international community’s most concessional assistance and preferential market access.

This tension goes to the heart of the Pacific LDC dilemma. Graduation is meant to signal that a country no longer needs special international support. But the LDC framework captures only part of the regional reality. Structural constraints – remoteness, narrow export bases, limited fiscal space, and extreme climate exposure – are not transitional challenges that disappear with income growth. They are permanent features.

This is reflected in the Economic and Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI), the third graduation criterion. Solomon Islands’ recent EVI (50) remains well above the UN threshold (32), reflecting heavy dependence on logging and fisheries, geographic dispersion and climate risk.

Solomon Islands’ graduation should be treated as a test case for the Pacific.

Solomon Islands is not alone. Kiribati and Tuvalu, both of which have repeatedly met the graduation criteria, face similar debates. Each may continue to pass the technical thresholds while remaining highly vulnerable, raising a simple question: is the LDC graduation process placing enough weight on vulnerability?

No is increasingly the answer. The current framework allows countries to graduate by meeting income and social thresholds even when vulnerability remains extremely high. Yet countries that remain structurally exposed are often not ready to lose access to international support measures, including concessional finance, trade preferences and other forms of special treatment.

For highly vulnerable states, graduation is less about the date than the terms: transition length, access to concessional finance, and the pace of the shift from grants to loans. This argues for a stronger vulnerability lens in graduation decisions and, at minimum, more robust “smooth transition” frameworks, longer preparatory periods and extended access to key benefits after graduation.

In practice, Solomon Islands is already pursuing that path. Recognising these challenges, the government secured a delay to graduation from 2024 to 2027 after the Covid-19 pandemic, civil unrest and disasters disrupted national planning. It has since adopted policies aimed at making graduation “sustainable and irreversible” including through economic diversification, stronger public finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. But such ambitions will require significant investments at a time when government revenues are thin and unlikely to expand.

Development partners are therefore decisive.

Graduation will not immediately cut off Solomon Islands from aid. Official development assistance still accounts for roughly one-third of government revenue, and eligibility is determined by OECD income thresholds that are far higher than the LDC cutoff. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the European Union have all indicated that their support will continue after graduation. However, some losses are unavoidable: the UN’s dedicated climate fund for LDCs, even if small in scale for Solomon Islands, will close to new proposals once graduation occurs.

The main risk to development financing does not stem from LDC graduation but from the expected shift, from 2026, of multilateral development bank financing – around 13 percent of total aid – from grants toward loans, following the IMF’s assessment that Solomon Islands’ external debt is sustainable.

Australia, as the Solomon Islands’ largest development partner, will be central to managing the transition. Its support so far has rightly focused on governance, health and education. But as graduation nears, the emphasis should shift toward economic resilience – including scaled-up investment in climate-resilient economic infrastructure.

Partners can also accelerate economic diversification. Supporting the Bina Harbour tuna processing project – a credible near-term alternative to declining logging revenues – would be a strong first step. Mining, while politically sensitive, has already overtaken logging as a source of export revenue and could be transformative if governance improves and tax exemptions are tightened. Australia could help shape outcomes by pairing blended finance, guarantees and technical expertise with firm environmental, social and governance standards.

Trade policy is another lever. While most preferences will remain, some exports – particularly coconut oil and veneer sheets – will face higher tariffs in key markets such as South Korea, Switzerland and Japan. Partners could help offset this by supporting export diversification, facilitating market access elsewhere, and investing in standards compliance and value-addition.

Solomon Islands’ graduation should be treated as a test case for the Pacific. A “soft landing” – graduating on schedule, backed by well-managed resources, realistic sequencing of reforms, and extended support from development partners – offers the most credible path forward. Australia and other partners should also use this moment to continue to push for broader reforms through the UN, OECD and development banks so that vulnerability weighs more heavily in future graduation decisions.

And if Solomon Islands ultimately concludes that the risks of graduation are too great, partners should be prepared to support a further deferral request.

Because graduation should not lead to greater fragility. It should mark a transition to stronger resilience.

Fish fraud is widespread in markets, grocers and restaurants around the world, but a growing number of innovative tools are turning the tide, according to a new report published on Tuesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

While there is no official estimate of how prevalent fraud is in the US$195 billion global fisheries and aquaculture sector, empirical studies suggest that 20 percent of the trade may be subject to some type of fraud, according to FAO.

Menu of misinformation

Some studies suggest that up to 30 percent of seafood products may be mislabelled in restaurants, with the report citing cases from around the world, from ceviche stands in Latin America and seafood eateries in China to canned tuna products in the European Union.

While as much as one third of aquatic products sold in the United States may not conform to package descriptions, less than one percent of imports are tested, the report warned.

What drives fish fraud?

Economic incentives are the most widespread driver of fish fraud.

Selling Atlantic salmon, almost all of which is farmed, as Pacific salmon, most of which is wild caught, delivers a nearly US$10 benefit per kilogramme.

Some fraud occurs to mask the geographic provenance of a product or to suppress evidence of above-quota landings, which may pose risks to the sustainability of fishery stocks.

Finding fraud

Fish fraud is defined in the report as “a deliberate practice intended to deceive others” and can pose risks to biodiversity, human health or economic systems, according to Food fraud in the fisheries and aquaculture sector, produced by FAO through cooperation between its Fisheries and Aquaculture Division and the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture.

The main categories of fish fraud are:

*Adding water to unprocessed fishery products to bolster weight and price
*Adulteration (adding colouring to make tuna look fresher)
*Counterfeiting (imitation shrimp made from starch-based compounds)
*Simulation (packaging surimi to seem like crab meat)
*Diversion (distributing legitimate products outside of their intended markets)
*Misbranding (such as incorrect claims about sustainability)
*Overrun (involving overfishing)
*Species substitution (selling tilapia as red snapper)
*Tampering and mislabelling (involving origins and even expiry dates)
*Plain theft

Meanwhile, the human welfare risks of some seafood frauds are evident as some fish pose risks when eaten raw, while re-freezing seafood increases the risk of bacterial growth.

Catching fishy business

The global scale of fish consumption – targeting over 12,000 seafood species – the diversity of fraud type and the lack of standardised regulatory or legal definitions, make global estimates difficult to assess, but there are novel ways to tackle the scourge.

Advanced laboratory tests can be effective in identifying substances, but access to these methods is limited.

Meanwhile, the report shows that portable X-ray fluorescence and machine-learning models are innovations that could help cut fraud and make regulations more enforceable.

To quash fish fraud, the new report advocates for:

*Harmonised labelling requirements
*Mandatory inclusion of scientific names where possible
better traceability systems
*Adding science to the tacklebox

Given its complexity, identifying the crime is not straightforward, but the report goes into considerable detail about how advances in science can contribute to tackling fraud, including:

*A standard method to determine whether and how many times a seafood product has been frozen has so far proven elusive, but differences in the fatty-acid composition of wild and farmed fish may be used to detect fraud
*Carbon and nitrogen ratios to determine the geographical origin of major commercial fish species

Netting offenders

Prevention and enforcement are critical to reduce and eventually eliminate fish and all food fraud, according to the report, which reviewed concerted efforts to tackle cases in Argentina, Italy and the United States.

An investigation using DNA-barcoding to assess the scale of mislabelling in Los Angeles, California, found that while it is quite low in processing plants, it is moderate among grocers and particularly prevalent in sushi restaurants.

A local initiative by local academia, industry, government stakeholders – together with an education campaign coupled with ongoing blind tests, reduced seafood mislabelling in the focus area by two thirds over 10 years.

What the UN’s doing

Part of UN ongoing efforts include:

*FAO and the Codex Alimentarius Commission – the international food standards body – are working on toughening international standards to combat food fraud through the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre, FAO offers technical support to members that need to bolster their testing capacities.