What The South Pacific Is All About
Professor Ron Crocombe reveals all in book
There are travel guides to the Pacific Islands, and there are other guides to them.
There are novels with Pacific Islands settings that never really were so, but very few about what they amount to now.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
Is there a guide to put people interested in investing, working or just living in the region in the useful position of arriving with some insights of how the Pacific Islands work as 21st century independent states? That describes what troubles and obstacles beset them? And tells of their modest triumphs, individually or collectively?
There is. The title of this 790-page chunk of enlightenment is naturally "The South Pacific." This quickly stresses that the South Pacific includes parts of the North Pacific, including most of Micronesia, which is quite different from Melanesia and Polynesia. There are 28 Pacific Islands independent states and dependent territories in total.
Ron Crocombe, professor emeritus, University of the South Pacific, the book's learned author, who lives at Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, has dissected and analysed the Pacific Islands condition for 40 years. He's brought out four previous slim editions. This latest effort is a vastly extended and updated one. Readers of the preceding editions, are nevertheless strongly advised to begin Edition Five at Page One and consume it all the way through.
The Crocombe portrait of the modern Pacific Islands does not depict Paradise. Be prepared to read it and perhaps become disillusioned, but not entirely disenchanted.
For the ignorant who do not have ideas about living and doing business in the Islands, the lesson to be drawn from ŒThe South Pacific' is that the region is not an uncomplicated place. You'll discover a desire to know more of it, particularly if you are daft enough to dream seriously of retiring to a little grass shack on a beach, under the palms, somewhere in Fiji, or Vanuatu, or Samoa.
The thing about the Pacific is that not only is it an enormous region, it is full of differences. Oceania's 7 million people speak more than 1300 languages. That's about a quarter of the world's total for a minute fraction of the world's total population.
The giant of the region, independent Papua New Guinea, with over 5 million people and with 462,243 square kilometres of territory, 83.2 percent of all the region's land, has 800 to 900 languages. The smallest territory is Tokelau, three atolls near Samoa with 12 square kilometres of territory and 1500 people. The origins of Pacific Islanders and the difference of their cultures and habitats are fascinating and unending debated subjects.
Before dipping into the Crocombe chronicles of the way the Pacific Islands actually now, and may become, it is worth stressing that apart from a few current hot spots, malaria in some places, and varying degrees of risk as regards to hepatitis, typhoid, the runs, mugging, AIDS and daylight robbery, know-all travel books are generally accurate in depicting Oceania as generally being a safe, pleasant, visually splendid and greatly rewarding, if sometimes frustrating region to travel and holiday in. Yes, there are still a few backwater corners of little grass shack beachside idyllic pads remaining to be discovered.
As with Africa, Asia, South America, and even parts of Europe and the United States, Pacific Islanders are grappling with a dismayingly wide range of political, economic, social and cultural difficulties.
Here's a short list of a few of those touched on by Professor Crocombe. Nuclear bomb test pollution, corruption, unemployment, toxic wastes, overpopulation, land erosion, suicide, marketing force-fed consumption (beginning with Coca Cola), foreign television programme saturation, ethnic strife, privatisation, class struggle, selective interference (by outside foreign governments), regional security, the Bougainville war, when the security forces become criminals, buying voters, the MIRAB concept (migration, remittance, aid and bureaucracy.)
Heavy stuff, and not comfortably digestible at leisure in a little grass beachside shack.
Distance and isolation, and for many, a paucity of viably commercially exploitive resources, and small populations and hence local markets, make most Pacific Islands economies very fragile things.
Air and sea transport costs are great because all A to B distances are great. They add greatly to the cost of imports and quite likely render exports uncompetitive by the time they land in foreign markets.
What do the Pacific Islands have to sell? Melanesia, with minerals including gold, copper and nickel, dense rainforest cover and some of the world's richest tuna fishing grounds, is comparatively fortunate, but still badly lacking in training manpower and infrastructure. Polynesia and Micronesia have some fish, but really very little else. One common attribute is colourful culture and scenery and a relatively unpolluted warm coral islands and tropical sea environment.
This perhaps, makes tourism the South Pacific's greatest economic hope for many of its countries, but not for some of the smallest and poorest of them. Being a microstate has its handicaps, peculiarities, but also advantages. The Pacific's micro-states, Crocombe notes, are surrounded by the world's largest, richest and most powerful nations. The imbalance appears extreme, he says. "If we focus on people, however, the imbalance is reversed.
Relative to population size, Pacific Islanders have the greatest power in the world in international forums. The 7 million people of the 14 islands nations of the Pacific Islands Forum (the region's political club of independent states) have more voting power than the 3500 million people of China, India, Japan and United States put together in many international forums. But it would be wise not to overuse it, lest the larger powers restructure the international system on a more democratic basis."
What of Pacific Islands achievements? Take just one. Crocombe explains: "The independent Pacific Islands nations are the only region of the Third World where governments have since independence been chosen by regular elections, the democratic process respected and followed, and constitutions so fully observed. Over 150 national elections have been held since independence and the only instance of power not going to the elected majority was the 1987 Fiji coup.
But Fiji prepared another constitution in 1990 and changed it again after public consultations in 1997. In the developing world this is a remarkable achievement."
