Upfront
Guessing At The Horizon
Strong Currents of Change Began In 2003
Often during 2003 I reached for the January 2003 Almanac section—to check the spelling of a prime minister’s name, or the population or gross domestic product numbers for various Pacific countries or territories. I hope that readers have had the same satisfaction of being able to find valuable information about the region gathered in one place.
If you compare the 2004 version of the Almanac with last year’s version, you start to pick up clues to some telling trends. Population, for instance, is growing rapidly in countries like the Marshall Islands, Fiji and the territory of American Samoa. Yet in other Island groups there is negative population growth. This is not always a matter of a population’s fertility, but often the key variable is access to migration.
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Two long-time trends: there are more Niueans in New Zealand than in Niue, and in the Cooks, where the population is just a bit above last year, easy access to New Zealand means the younger generation finds its pathway to economic adulthood lies in Aotearoa. This human movement leads to another. If you should vacation in the Cooks, or go there for business, you will notice that Fiji citizens staff many of the hotels. So one migration pattern leading to new opportunities creates another, intra-regional movement of opportunity.
With some exceptions, the 2004 data on gross domestic product and projected growth for Island GDPs looks hopeful—even in the consistently-troubled Solomon Islands.
Another indicator of economic health is the increasing number of households in the Pacific that have access to land line or wireless telephone and Internet access. In our special telecom section this month, we look at several examples from around the region of the cagey, distrustful interplay between entrenched, government-run telecoms and the challenging, upstart private companies that are trying to bring more efficient telecom services to Island markets. It’s a story that involves and ever-tilting balance between local lawmaking, regulation, technological innovation and business strategy.
Governments in the region have been slow to let loose the legal reins for many telecoms to make a go of it in a free market environment. The public good is hard for many bureaucracies to keep in mind as they hold on to old ideas about the role of government in an age of changing technology.
If you are on the ocean, with your eyes about five feet above the surface, the horizon you see, where sky meets sea, is only about two and a half miles away. So it’s hard to know what lies beyond.
In the same way, the line where 2003 and 2004 converge gives a limited line of sight. Yet I will bet it’s safe to say that 2004 will be looked back on as a pivotal year in Pacific history. It was a year in which sovereignty began to be redefined as Australia leads efforts into rehabilitating the governments of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea—and as the U.S. pressured the Marshalls and the Federated States of Micronesia into accepting tighter U.S. fiscal controls and demanded that American Samoa install an independent auditor.
The debate over this has twirled around the old notions of colonialism versus independence, but 2003 may have proved this old dichotomy to be unhelpful, and inaccurate at best. Seeing over the horizon is not really possible, but what’s in the works, just out there beyond where we can see, is a political map of the Pacific world in which migration, commerce and a network of regional agreements will redefine the old dualities of colony and metropole, of a mythical absolute independence versus a more real world of interpenetrating sovereignties.
Of course the ever-moving horizon of time and history will continue through 2004 as these currents of change pull the region into what I hope will be a future filled with new ways of doing business and new ways of governing. Francis Bacon was right when he said, “Time is the greatest innovator.”
