Bolivia still marks a Day of the Sea for the coast it lost
Forty-four countries have no coastline, and two of them, Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan, are surrounded entirely by other landlocked states. Lacking a coast tends to mean pricier trade and slower growth: nine of the twelve countries lowest on the Human Development Index are landlocked, and nations have long schemed for even a sliver of shoreline.
Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country, Kyrgyzstan sits farthest from any ocean, and Ethiopia has the biggest population. Their number jumped after 1990, when there were only 30, as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia broke apart and new states such as Eritrea and South Sudan emerged. The UN classes 32 of the 44 as landlocked developing countries. In Asia, such countries pay about three times as much as coastal neighbours to ship cargo abroad, and the economist Paul Collier counts being landlocked among bad neighbours as one of four development traps.
Europe shows that geography is not destiny. Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Vatican City are all prosperous, and most of them lean toward neutrality in world politics. Rivers help: the Danube, an international waterway, gives Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Moldova a route to the Black Sea, though ocean ships cannot use it, and Switzerland reaches the sea by barge along the Rhine.
History is full of workarounds. The 1885 Conference of Berlin granted the Congo a thin strip through Angolan territory to the Atlantic. After World War I, Poland received a corridor to the Baltic and turned the fishing village of Gdynia into a port, while Czechoslovakia got a long lease on part of Hamburg's harbour that its Czech successor can use until 2028. In a 2005 swap with Ukraine, Moldova gained 600 metres of Danube bank and built a port on it. Bosnia's short coast at Neum exists because Ragusa handed the town to the Ottomans in 1699 to avoid bordering Venice.
Losing a coast can sting for generations. Bolivia ceded its shoreline, including Antofagasta and rich copper deposits, to Chile after the War of the Pacific, formalised in treaties of 1884 and 1904, and it still keeps a navy on Lake Titicaca and its rivers. Austria and Hungary lost Trieste and Fiume under the post-1918 treaties. Today the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea guarantees landlocked states untaxed transit to the sea.
Source: Landlocked country
