Seychelles 2018
Yearbook 2018
Seychelles. According to Countryaah.com, Victoria is the capital city of Seychelles, a country located in Eastern Africa. Parliament’s largest party group, the Seychelles Democratic Alliance, protested in March against the government’s plans to enforce an agreement on defense cooperation with India. (The Seychelles do not have a parliamentary system and the president, who is both head of state and government, does not need the support of a majority in the National Assembly.) The collaboration includes a military base that India wants to build on one of Seychelles’s outer islands. In addition to the reluctance for a foreign power to place a military base on the Seychelles’ territory, the opposition feared too great an Indian influence on the country’s economy. According to the government, the cooperation will strengthen coastguard in the work against illegal fishing, drug smuggling and piracy.
- According to Abbreviationfinder: SYC is an three letter acronym for Seychelles.
In February it was announced that two sea areas totaling 210,000 square kilometers were created. These should be protected from oil exploration and other major projects and fishing should be restricted. The project was made possible through an agreement with the US nature conservation group Nature Conservancy. Under the agreement, the Seychelles are to expand their protected marine areas to help the country repay part of its government debt. By 2018, the Nature Conservancy had raised $ 21 million for this purpose. In 2022, it is said that 410,000 square kilometers, corresponding to approximately 30% of the country’s sea areas, will be protected against virtually all human impact.
POPULATION AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
By 1998, according to United Nations estimates, the population had reached 76. 000 residents, with an average annual growth fell to ‘ 1, 5 % in the period 1990 – 97. The distribution of the population is rather uneven: almost 90 % of the residents live on the largest island, Mahé. The only major urban center is the capital, Victoria, which also performs port functions.
The economy of the Seychelles, up to the seventies based on subsistence agriculture, has a modernized structure, as indicated by the percentage composition of GDP: the contribution of the primary sector was limited to 4.3 %, that of the secondary sector it settled at 24.9 %, the remaining share belongs to the tertiary sector which employs 72.3 % of the active population. In the period 1990 – 97, thanks to the expansion of tourism, GDP grew on average at an annual rate of 3.3 %.
In the early 1990s, the government launched a five-year development plan (1990 – 94) aimed mainly at attracting foreign capital. In 1995, steps were taken to transform the Seychelles into an offshore financial center and in an important air and sea traffic hub for the Indian Ocean area. Other interventions were aimed at the creation of an export free zone and the privatization of tourist facilities belonging to the state (hotels and port services in the capital). Despite the recent development processes and the economic policy measures undertaken by the government, the foreign debt remains high and constitutes the main obstacle to be overcome in order to consolidate the economic system. The most widespread agricultural crops are represented by the coconut palm, banana tree, tea. Fishing has become increasingly important since the 1980s, so much so that in 1996 the sale of fresh and preserved fish (tuna) covered over 28% of the total export value. Significant revenues come from the sale of fishing licenses in the territorial waters of the archipelago to fleets of foreign countries. The industry has developed almost exclusively the food sector (beer, preserves, mineral waters) and the tobacco processing sector (cigarettes). Tourism is constantly expanding.
