Opinion & Commentary
Pacific aid policy must indeed be based on facts
Australia is the leading aid donor in the Pacific, taking its responsibility to its neighbours seriously. Three years ago The Centre for Independent Studies focussed attention on the Pacific because, in spite of the highest per capita aid in the world, Pacific people - particularly women and children-had appalling health with HIV/AIDS threatening to reach African epidemic proportions in Papua New Guinea.
With the exception of small elites of politicians and bureaucrats, islanders were deprived of the benefits of modern society. Rape, domestic violence and crime were growing, with coups and civil conflicts escalating. High rates of growth were clearly needed to raise living standards for Pacific islanders.
The contributors to the recent Australia Institute report '' Privatising Land in the Pacific: A Defence of Customary Tenures'', claim that the CIS data are wrong in showing that the Pacific, and PNG in particular, have stagnated for 30 years.
They claim that the Pacific has enjoyed vigorous agricultural growth based on communal land ownership. I have gone back to check Pacific economic and social data, also referring to the findings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. All these sources agree that with the exception of Samoa , that achieved a modest (for a developing economy) growth of 3-4 per cent per annum, Pacific growth has at best been only as high as population growth, so that standards of living have stagnated. Apart from a small group of elites, only those Pacific islanders who have emigrated have acceptable living standards.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation data clearly indicate that palm oil is the only significant agricultural export that has grown in the Pacific during the past 30 years. Sugar, coffee, copra, cocoa and tea exports have declined. And even palm oil has lost market share. Agricultural production and export data are consistent with years of media reports of women struggling to grow food for a rising population and with increasing disputes over communally-owned land.
The Australia Institute's second, and principal critique, argues that the Pacific's communal land tenure is consistent with rising agricultural output. The authors quote the experience of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea, who, with the help of missionaries, have grown betel as a cash crop for the domestic market and succeeded in educating 20 children to the tertiary level.
Pacific islanders are as able as any people in the world. There are not hundreds but thousands of examples of villagers taking up new crops such as coffee, taro, vanilla, vegetables and many others, not only for domestic but also for foreign markets, only to see them run into sand because of the absence of secure private property rights in land.
The women who have tried to improve lives for their families through working hard on the land have become bitter as they see their efforts come to nothing. The Pacific is no different from the rest of the world in being unable to develop without individual property rights.
Establishing individual property rights in land is not the only urgent reform that is blocking development in the Pacific, but it is the most important one. The Australia Institute has provided a service in making it clear that the opposition to communal land tenure reform does not only come from the ''big men'' who exploit their fellow villagers under communal ownership, but that the expatriates who have spent years as researchers and bureaucrats in the Pacific are a critical component of the opposition to growth.
The CIS works for progress, not only for Australians but for people everywhere, believing that Pacific islanders, no less than Australians, deserve productive employment, a decent income, good education and the health that prosperity makes possible.
Professor Helen Hughes is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
