Significance of a country being landlocked Historically, being landlocked was regarded as a disadvantageous position. It cuts the country off from sea resources such as fishing, but more importantly cuts off access to seaborne trade which, even today, makes up a large percentage of international trade. Around the world, coastal regions tend to be wealthier and more heavily populated than inland ones. Countries thus have made particular efforts to avoid being landlocked. The International Congo Society, which owned the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, was given a thin piece of land bisecting Angola to connect it to the sea by the Conference of Berlin in 1885. The Dubrovnik Republic had once gifted the town of Neum to the Ottoman Empire because it did not want to have a land border with Venice; this small municipality was inherited by Bosnia and Herzegovina for which it now provides limited sea access, splitting the Croatian part of the Adriatic coast in two. After WWI Poland was given the Danzig Corridor to give it an outlet on the sea. The Danube was internationalized so that landlocked Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia could have secure access to the sea. Losing access to the sea is often a great blow to nations. The successful separatist movement in Eritrea and the current one in Montenegro are of greater concern to their host countries than they would be otherwise as they control the nations' only coastline. Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific. Still to this day the Bolivian Navy trains in Lake Titicaca for an eventual recovery and, in the 21st century, the selection of the route of gas pipes from Bolivia to the sea fueled popular risings. Hungary also lost its access to the sea as a consequence of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920: although Croatia had a constitutional autonomy within Hungary, the City of Fiume was independent, governed directly as a corpus separatum from Budapest by an appointed governor, as Hungary's only international port between 1779-1813, 1822-1848 and 1868-1918. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea now gives a landlocked country a right of access to and from the sea, without taxation of traffic through transit states. The United Nations has a programme of action to assist Landlocked Developing Countries, and the current responsible Undersecretary General is Anwarul Karim Chowdhury. Some countries may have a large coastline, but no readily usable one. For instance, Russia's only ports were on the Arctic Ocean and frozen shut much of the year. Gaining control of a warm water port was a major motivator of Russian expansion towards the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Pacific Ocean. Similarly, several countries have coastlines on landlocked seas, such as the Caspian and the Aral. Since these seas are sometimes considered to be lakes, and since they do not allow access to seaborne trade, countries such as Kazakhstan are still considered to be landlocked. An island nation, a country completely surrounded by water, is the opposite of a landlocked one. [edit] Landlocked countries Afghanistan Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan* Belarus Bhutan Bolivia Botswana Burkina Faso Burundi Central African Republic Chad Czech Republic Ethiopia Hungary Kazakhstan* Kyrgyzstan Laos Lesotho Liechtenstein Luxembourg Macedonia Malawi Mali Moldova Mongolia Nepal Niger Paraguay Rwanda San Marino Serbia Slovakia Swaziland Switzerland Tajikistan Turkmenistan* Uganda Uzbekistan Vatican City Zambia Zimbabwe * Each of these countries has a coast on the non-freshwater Caspian Sea