Dev Nadkarni
One Pacific Islands resource Australia and New Zealand's agricultural sector can easily tap into is readily available, largely reliable, easily trainable-and importantly, English speaking-labour.

Administrations of both countries, however, have been lukewarm in their responses to suggestions from all quarters, over the years, to facilitate increased labour influx, even if seasonally, from the Pacific Islands.

While Australia has tended to take a harder stance on the issue, New Zealand has been more receptive to the idea with employers now being able to apply for quotas of seasonal labour from the Pacific islands under schemes like AIP (Approval in Principle) that brought in a couple of thousand seasonal workers last year.

Yet, despite New Zealand's horticultural sector urgently needing hands for seasonal tasks such as fruit-picking for several years now, immigration policies have tended to move slowly in facilitating the required availability of Pacific Islands seasonal labour for that highly labour-intensive sector.

At the time of writing, a major conference is getting underway in Wellington where experts from a number of fields from across the Pacific region will debate on the regional labour movement issue. Over the years, regional organisations and the private sector have addressed the issue and discussed it with successive governments in both countries.

Though they claim to encourage regional economic integration involving Pacific islands economies, governments have always skirted the issue of labour movement. It has defied resolution mainly because of concerns on the part of the governments.

One of the cornerstones of the Forum Countries' Pacific Plan is economic integration and a key issue in it is that of labour movement.

At the heart of the governments' concerns is the problem of overstaying-which is indeed an important worry. In New Zealand alone, in 2005, a third of the 20,000 illegal overstayers were people from the Pacific Islands.

Illegal overstaying is not just a strain on the host countries' policing, staffing and legal resources but a potential hot potato that can have implications on law and order, human rights and international relations to speak nothing of ethno-cultural issues.

The overstaying problem is a concern big enough to have caused the intransigence in the government machinery in dealing with the labour movement issue even at the cost of hurting the countries' labour-intensive industries. Both Australia and New Zealand have, instead, experimented with other sources of seasonal labour such as using backpacker tourists from developed countries that are allowed to work in the agricultural sector while they are touring the country.

Australia gave permits to over 100,000 backpacker-tourists from developed western countries last year.

This has turned out to be a less-than-efficient solution to the problem because of the need to train every new batch of backpacker-worker, early termination of contracts because of lack of interest and the fact that these are tourists first and workers only by the way, to earn a few extra bucks while they are travelling. None of these problems would come with professional seasonal migrant workers from Pacific island countries.

Not that there is no solution to the problem of the seasonal migrant worker turning to be an overstayer. One effective way to ensure this does not happen is to hold a large part of the worker's earnings in an interest-bearing trust account that the worker can access only at the physical point of exit such as an airport. While on the job, the worker can be paid a subsistence wage to meet daily needs.

This would substantially decrease the chances of overstaying at the end of the contract simply because of the lack of access to extra funds. Similarly, employers could also be made to supply guarantees for the workers. Some European countries have used this arrangement successfully and it is certainly worth a try in New Zealand.

As the need for seasonal workers increases in Australia and New Zealand, the population of working-age people is also consistently increasing in the islands with demand for jobs either stagnating or actually shrinking in some islands economies.

If regional economic integration is to work, freer labour movement within the region will have to be facilitated with all the necessary safeguards in place.

Seasonal migrant labour from the islands will in any case help in giving a further fillip to many islands' biggest revenue earner-remittances from overseas.

Experts gathering at the Wellington conference would do well to come up with schemes that assure the governments of the ANZAC countries against the problem of overstaying -quite clearly the biggest stumbling block in the way of opening their doors a crack wider to allow a freer flow of seasonal workers from the Pacific islands.

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AID RACE?

Are we seeing another mighty aid race in the Pacific islands region? In just the past two months or so, almost all the Pacific big brothers have pledged increased amounts of aid to the Pacific islands-all of it ostensibly unconditional, of course! In the run-up to the International Whaling Commission meeting in the Caribbean last month, Japan upped its aid to the islands by a quarter to US$354 million.

That was close on the heels of China's cheap loans package of US$374 million announced during Wen Jiabao's visit to Fiji for the first ever China-Pacific trade summit. All this is on top of the aid packages that some Pacific islands countries received in the last 12 months. Just before this promise of Asian big money, Australia pledged relatively small money (US$7.2 million) over six years for promoting private sector development in the islands, but said it would double its Pacific aid package to US$2.9 billion. It also pledged special funds for the education sector and for troubled East Timor.

Though every donor is at pains to explain that all of its aid is unconditional, there were rumblings within some of these countries' governments after the way some of the Pacific islands nations voted at the whaling meet.

All that aid gives the lie to the avowed plans of some of these countries to replace aid with trade. And with more money coming their way, the islands nations should be ever mindful that there are never any free lunches-even if whale meat is on the menu!