Teenagers from Nauru before an art performance to open the Pacific Islands Forum in 2018. - Jason Oxenham / AP / SIPA

The British once called it  Pleasant Island . But its paradisiacal side, the island of Nauru - more than 4,000 km north of Australia - lost it at the same time as the phosphate deposits dried up. Exclusive wealth of this Pacific island, phosphate ore allowed Nauru to have the second largest GDP in 1974, three times higher than that of the United States.

A fleeting prosperity with the exhaustion of the deposits in the early 1990s. There, the evils of this exploitation of the island were revealed: 80% of the land devastated, 40% of the marine life killed and a health crisis ( obesity, smoking, diabetes) on a large scale. With our partner Brut, discover Nauru, "the country that ate itself".

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