As the chiefs of the region's many non-government organisations (NGOs) working in the interests of Pacific women jet around the world from one conference to another, delivering slick presentations and filing copious status reports, appalling news stories of the very constituency they represent fill the region's media pages with sickening regularity.
Close on the heels of the communal killing of a young woman in Papua New Guinea on suspicion of sorcery and accusation of spreading HIV come reports from around the region about the exploitation of young women-even girls in many cases-and their treatment as commodities that earn money for the menfolk who are supposed to be entrusted in their care.
Although the exploitation of women and girls is not new in the region (or in many other parts of the world for that matter) and has been reported for several decades now, the number of cases of young girls and women being sold off to expatriate workers like loggers and visiting ship hands and forced into the sex trade because of grinding poverty are increasing at a worrying pace throughout the region. This is beginning to happen even in countries where such incidents have been hitherto rare.
Recently, this magazine published an in-depth report on the sexual exploitation of women in the Solomon Islands. That country's media continue to report stories of young girls in the national capital Honiara who are being routinely picked up, taken to ships moored offshore and dumped back at the port with portions of fish and some cash as compensation for the services rendered to the seamen during their night out on the ships.
So efficient is the supply chain of young female human cargo to the ships that the activity continued unhindered even as the authorities clamped down in an operation called "Clean Harbour" to prevent such occurrences. The girls left in small boats under cover of darkness and were sent back in the wee hours of dawn when policing was lax.
Much more than the efficiency of the supply chain and the involvement of a variety of players-from ships' agents to security guards-what is material here is the willingness of the young women to take grave personal risks and embark on such activity. Which, indeed, speaks volumes of the compulsion wrought on them by economic circumstances-the fact that they have to sell their honour for a few kilos of fish and a fistful of dollars to satisfy the pangs of their own and their families' hunger.
Apart from the question of morals, ethics and honour, the big risk these young girls expose themselves to is the host of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV which is feared to be growing at a relentless pace throughout the Pacific Islands, mainly propelled by male visitors from the outside world but proliferated internally by their unsuspecting local female partners that contract the infection.
Honiara and the Solomon Islands are not an isolated instance. The same script has been played out in several other Pacific Islands countries and territories. The infamous case of the "Kokoreas" in Kiribati, which involved young girls spending their nights offshore with the crew of visiting Korean vessels for a price became serious enough for the government of Korea to send a team to Tarawa to help curb the menace. But the growing instance of HIV in that remote island state indicates it might have been too late.
Though they are so far removed from the outside world, the islands states are highly susceptible to contagious diseases brought from the outside world because of the very insularity of their populations. This has happened down the centuries beginning with the early explorers who brought foreign diseases into the islands and nearly wiped out entire populations because of the lack of resistance to the newly introduced diseases.
The women of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas too have long suffered from sexual exploitation by the tourist industry as well as by itinerant expatriates as in the case of the Solomon Islands and Kiribati and the port towns of Papua New Guinea and many islands states whose coastlines teem with activities that involve visiting temporary workers.
Quite clearly, it is rampant poverty, the lack of education and therefore the impossibility of finding gainful employment accompanied by the rapid change from being subsistence economies to monetised ones-thereby necessitating the need to possess paper money-that is driving women and girls to what has long been described as the world's oldest profession. 
A report from Fiji last month states that even in that country-where such instances were so far rare compared to other Pacific Islands nations-cases of girls and women being sold off for financial gain by their own families are on the increase. While most NGOs and government agencies tend to concentrate on urban and semi urban areas, these instances are on the rise even in the rural areas where it is harder for the media to highlight the cases.
If this is happening in the Pacific Islands region's most developed country, where the government has made primary education compulsory and has relatively better reporting and policing infrastructure, then one can only imagine the plight of the poorer nations that have worse economies and little infrastructure to counter the onslaught of this blight on human dignity.
It is not enough for NGOs working in the sector to merely throw up their hands in despair and begin a finger pointing exercise blaming the government for the long neglect of the countries' economies or for the political circumstances of some of the countries (such as Fiji).
NGOs are supposed to work at the grassroots level and must strive to bring about change at that level by concentrating resources where it matters the most-the vulnerable young girls and women and their economically disadvantaged families. They must do all they can to bring to light the plight of these exploited women before the larger world as well as their respective governments and demand action.
Failure to tackle this menace could potentially result in serious epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases among the entire populations especially in the insular islands societies. It would also doubtedlessly result in increased cases of ostracism, witch-hunting and honour killings (as has already happened in PNG in more than one case) and irreversibly changing the demographic of the islands leading to both social and economic turmoil.