While the world’s population is growing at about 1.5% annually, population growth in the fifteen PICs served by UNFPA exceeds 2.1%. At this rate, their estimated population of 6.25 million in 1997 would grow by an additional 700 thousa nd (or 11%) in 5 years and 1.5 million (or 24%) in the subsequent 10 years, doubling to 12.5 million by the year 2030. What would this mean for the quality of life in these countries as we know it today?

The rate of population growth has exceeded the rate of economic growth in a majority of the island countries during the past decad e such that per capita income has stagnated or declined. The lack of structural change, particularly in rural areas, has boosted rural-urban migration, perhaps stimulated by rising levels of education and increased job expectations, such that the speed of construction of urban squatter settlements has become a problem in Suva, Honiara, Port Vila, Nuku’alofa, Tarawa, Majuro and elsewhere. While absolute poverty and destitution – in the sense of severe malnutrition – is largely absent from these countries, there is concern over growing household inequality and relative poverty, including rising income disparities both between urban and rural areas and within urban areas, rising joblessness and expanding criminal activities.

Population growth and increasing urbanisation are having deleterious and damaging effects on the environment of the PICs. Environmental degradation is evident in a number of countries, particularly in urban areas, as population influx and natural growth exert pressure on clean water supplies, sanitation and coastal reefs and in-shore fishing grounds. The quest to generate economic growth and foreign exchange has l ed to the unsustainable depletion of natural resources, particularly fish stocks and forests. Some of the Polynesian countries have managed to relieve such population pressure in the past by off-loading some of their citizens to Pacific-Rim countries but this escape value may be closing. Furthermore, large scale donor aid has supported infrastructural construction and operating costs but, there too, donor fatigue has led to a downward trend in the supply of this source of funding.

Meanwhile, economic restructuring and reform is curtailing the major source of public sector employment in these countries, with no obvious viable alternative. Income and employm ent prospects face a major crisis in Cook Islands and Marshall Islands as there is massive downsizing of the public sector. The other countries in Micronesia which also depend on Compact of Free Association funding face an impending crisis as the end of the Compact draws near.

Therefore, it is impossible to be anything but skeptical about the prospects for generating sustained economic growth and sustainable development in the Pacific sub-region in the next decade. New sources of economic growth, including a rejuvenated rural economy, have yet to emerge. Without economic growth, past advances made in human resources development, including improved health and women’s status, will be much more difficult to maintain. Not coincidentally, countries with the highest rates of population growth have the lowest per capita income, and perhaps, the poorest prospects for raising real income levels.

The present age structure of the populations is such that it is broad at the base and through the child-bearing years, ensuring that population growth will be substantial for the foreseeable future. This means that youth dependency (the ratio of the young dependent population under 15 years to the population in the working ages 15-64) will remain significant. Curre ntly, the share of the under 15 years age group in the total population exceeds one-third in all the countries and every 100 persons in the working age groups is liable to support 50 or more dependents, those aged under 15 and 65 and over. Because of the delay of at least 15-20 years in any future fertility decline affecting the number of new entrants to the labour force, the projected growth in labour forces of the PICs over this period far exceeds the growth rate of their populations. In the case of t he Solomon Islands, the outcome of a scenario with rising life expectancy and moderately declining fertility suggests that the total population would grow from 284 thousand in 1986 to 456 thousand, an increase of 61%, by 2001. This corresponds to an annu al growth rate of 3.2%, a "best case" scenario. Many of the other countries face similar potential population growth.

Meanwhile, planners and policy-makers must be prepared to implement policies and programmes which are "population accommodating", necessitating major investments in the health and education sectors just to maintain the far from satisfactory current provision of services. Such rapid population growth will also have major implications for the labour markets of the sub-region, since the small formal sectors cannot hope to accommodate all the newcomers from the education system, particularly when economic growth and employment creation have stagnated for at least the past decade in most countries.

Pressure on health budgets, health personnel and infrastructural facilities are already severe in many of the countries, particularly on rural facilities, such that the ability to provide universal and high quality reproductive health services and a wide choice of family planning methods and services under these circumstances will become increasingly more difficult.

School-age populations are anticipated to increase very substantially in several countries, particularly in Melanesia. Without an improvement in sustainable economic growth, the rising school-intakes will place an intolerable burden on the financing of education and insufficient employment opportunities will be created to cope with the rise in the number of people of working age. Currently, several countries are unable to provid e for universal primary education or do not attempt to absorb all qualified primary leavers into secondary school as a matter of policy. Given the known relationship between rising girls’ educational attainments and subsequent declines in rates of fertil ity, such constraints are likely to impede further demographic behavioural change. Indeed, in the South Pacific in recent years, both the shares of education spending in GDP and in government budgets have been declining.

The pressure on land will intensify in situations where demarcation disputes over traditional, communally-owned, unregistered land are growing rapidly in many of the countries. T he situation is especially volatile in those countries, such as Cook Islands, Niue, Tonga and Samoa, where large numbers of overseas residents return to lay claim to parcels of land. National and household-level food security are also threatened in some cases as locally grown food prices become uncompetitive with less nutritious but cheaper imported processed foods and where taste patterns have been irrevocably changed. The foreign exchange costs of imported foods are rising rapidly as populations grow yet, in most cases, export earnings with which to pay for these food imports fail to respond.

Food security in the island countries is also threatened not merely by burgeoning populations but because land resources are limited from which to harves t domestically grown food supplies and because taste patterns are changing such that a rising share of the islanders’ food is imported. Without a slowing down in population growth, more domestic saving and overseas investment to promote dynamic economic growth, and greater foreign exchange earnings from exports, the funds to pay for the rising food bill will dwindle, thus endangering food security.

To induce change in demographic behaviour without coercion, particularly with regard to fertility and migration behaviour, comprehensive and holistic inn ovative programmes will require formulation and implementation. Rural development may well retard rural to urban and overseas migration; improving the quality and quantity of reproductive health and family planning information and services can induce cou ples to employ more effective contraceptive methods to ensure that their desired and achieved fertility levels are more in unison. Raising the life-time opportunities of the girl child and improving the status of women in society can go a long way to empo wering women to be able to determine their own fertility behaviour. The creation of a political, social and cultural environment in which the small family norm is widely accepted can induce demographic change and sustainable livelihood.

This short analysis has underlined the importance of population-related and induced problems which must be dealt with in an integrated manner. Economic restructuring to promote s ustained growth, innovative development strategies and population policies are not dichotomous options but must be viewed as integral parts of an essential comprehensive strategy to address profound development problems affecting the island countries.