Asia-Pacific Population Journal - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2000

Many articles in the popular press and in academic journals decry the doomed state of our planet. In one recent journalistic account, “The Ends of the Earth”, the author (Kaplan, 1997) journeyed to see for himself “the corrosive effects of overpopulation and environmental degradation in the Third World”. What he found, not surprisingly, was consistent with what he had expected, based on the oft-cited statistical indicators of development - or more accurately, of the malaise of development - decay, disorder and depression. Similar indicators suggest that the news from the Pacific is not good either. Demographic trends particularly are invoked as harbingers of doom for these island countries and territories. The well-rehearsed scenario is a future condemned by overpopulation of under-resourced towns and depopulation of the outer islands; by agricultural communities beggared by the pressure of numbers, the degradation of their environmental resources, and the loss of their most productive members; by the inability of basic education and health services to make headway against the growing numbers of potential clients; and by economic stagnation that is deepened by the emigration of talent and the absence of jobs for the remnant of a low-skilled labour force (see, for example, Cole, 1993).

This article focuses on the introduction and establishment of family planning in Tonga and argues that family planning has been medicalized. In the process of institutionalizing family planning through the formal medical structure, what has occurred is that women - the focus of this national policy - have had their reproductive and sexual environments medicalized. Also, family planning at the macro level, aside from its clinical and medical objectives, has taken up a regulatory function for the socio-economic and developmental aspirations of the state.

Migration, one of the three components of population change, has become an increasing focus of research and policy development in many third world countries. Internal and international movements exert varying degrees of influence on specific countries or regions, depending on a mix of political, social, economic and environmental factors. The internal movement of Solomon Islanders is more visible and increasingly far more important than external movements, which more often than not are for educational purposes. In the third world, internal migration is strongly associated with rural-to-urban drift. However, this process involves a number of different movement streams, characterized by varying patterns and processes associated with various socioeconomic factors in places of both origin and destination (Pryor, 1975).