All states within the region are going through the demographic transition: hence the ‘doomsday syndrome’, which was prevalent a decade ago as the Pacific, and especially traced to Melanesia, then seemingly facing explosive growth rates, is now a thing of the past. (Fry 1997: 333–4; Chappell 2005: 295; cf. Bedford 2003). Nonetheless, population growth rates remain high in some states. While the average population growth rate is about 2.2 per cent, in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands it is about 2.6 per cent, though in both states it is now falling. In several states, such as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, growth rates are less than 1 per cent, partly because of high levels of out-migration. Here, as elsewhere in the region, there are very great differences.

Throughout the region life expectancies have risen in the past quarter of a century, but remain lowest in the Melanesian states. Infant mortality rates are also highest in Melanesia, with PNG and Kiribati (at 88 per thousand) being the worst of the region. In PNG there is evidence that the infant mortality rates are increasing largely because of the inadequate, and declining, provision of health services to rural areas. Some of the worst health and mortality problems are experienced in the growing urban settlements, especially in Port Moresby and those urban areas established on coral atolls (Connell and Lea 1992).

Although prolonged rural-urban migration, increasing pressure on rural land and urban services, rising youth unemployment, social discontent and high levels of maternal mortality all contributed to a more favourable climate for establishing population policies, as in PNG (McMurray 1992: 13), developing and implementing population policies has proved difficult. The factors that are most conducive to successful population policies — integration of population and development policies, improved rural development and communications to spread new values and reduce the economic significance of children, formal sector employment opportunities for women of increasing age of marriage — are usually absent. The outcome of high population growth rates has been that in most states there is a preponderance of young adults in the population, a situation that has placed strains on land resources, but also on employment markets, education and social organisation. A critical development issue throughout the Pacific is that of maintaining, let alone improving, present standards of living in the face of continued population increase.

In certain localised contexts, population pressure on resources is perceived as a growing problem. This is true in parts of the Highlands of PNG, and also in some coral atolls where, at least in Kiribati and Tuvalu, a ‘Malthusian crisis’ was recognised as early as the 1880s (Munro and Bedford 1980), and Islanders were being resettled in the 1940s. There are many local areas where population pressure on resources has created tensions, where land is not freely available, but is zealously guarded by its traditional owners. In Solomon Islands recent conflicts around Honiara were partly a consequence of Malaitans leaving their own densely populated island and settling on the land of the local Guadalcanal population, who resented the loss of their resources (and the greater competition for scarce urban jobs). More broadly, it has recently been argued that there is a possible correlation between recent political tensions in the Melanesian region (Fiji, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands), where migration is said to be limited or non-existent, and Polynesian and Micronesian states, where migration has been considerable and political stability much greater (Ware 2005). The argument no longer holds true for Fiji, and in any case there are other crucial differences and indications of tensions elsewhere (most recently in Tonga), which suggest that the relationship between migration, population pressure on resources and political tensions is much more complex.