Land Does not Expand. (is There) a Need for a Population Policy in the Kingdom of Tonga?

Abstract

This study is a longitudinal investigation into family planning in Tonga. The study is longitudinal since it discusses the development of family planning from 1958 to 1990. It also explores the reasons for the introduction of family planning in Tonga and explores some of the reasons why the objectives specified for family planning were never achieved by the various Tonga development plans. This thesis argues that family planning was introduced to control the rate of population growth in the Kingdom, which involves issues going beyond purely family planning objectives. Policy makers in Tonga were led to believe that the physical geography of the Kingdom, the limited size of the land, hence the limited resources of this limited land area was incapable of sustaining a rapidly increasing population. This classic Malthusian perspective of population growth on Tonga's "limited" resources led Tonga's policy makers and development planners to unquestioningly accept the belief that rapid population growth is the root cause of the Kingdom's development problems. Hence, family planning programs were inappropriately instituted to redress a social phenomenon, which was a symptom of the development process. One outcome of this was that prevention of pregnancy took precedence over the health and safety concerns of family planning acceptors. Many married Tongan women have become the targets of the Tonga Government's population control policy. In this individuals were scapegoated as the source of social problems. There was something wrong with having too many children and the solution for the women was to be prescribed the appropriate medication to cure this "wrong" or "illness" through family planning clinics. The perceived consequences of rapid population growth such as overcrowding, food shortage and land shortage are some of the major reasons for the introduction of family planning. But, is population growth entirely responsible for many of these problems? Many studies have shown that rapid population growth is not necessarily the principle factor obstructing the social, technological and economic advancement of developing countries. The fear of overpopulation or population growth was taken for granted without critical self-evaluation and appraisal. It would appear that family planning may have been a major strategy of the minority ruling elite to control the threat of the majority on a major source of their power base - the right to land which is constitutionally guaranteed to adult male Tongans. In the light of this point, this thesis argues that the adoption of family planning by the Government was a political act under the guise of "health" reform. In reality, family planning is a policy instrument of the State which is implemented by the medical establishment to protect the State's political and economic interests. As such, family planning is a form of social and political control enforced by the medical establishment on behalf of the State. High fertility and unregulated fertility are stigmatized as forms of deviant behaviours. The stigmatization of such deviant behaviours and the legitimating of the medical establishment to control and regulate human reproductive behaviours essentially endows medicine enormous powers of social and political control. In short, the social concept of family planning becomes medicalised. Individual couple's private decisions about their family size and spacing of pregnancies become the domain of the medical professionals. Another consequence of the medicalisation of family planning is the increasing dependence of women on artificial contraceptives to regulate and control their fertility. Since the family planning program specifically targets women, they become the victims of a patriarchal land tenure system and a patriarchal form of government that merely serves the interests of men. The evidence to support this thesis is of a number of types. An extensive analysis of Tongan planning documents is undertaken charting the introduction and growth of family planning through an extensive analysis of newspapers and annual health reports. In both of these, the political ramifications of family planning are documented. To demonstrate the impact of this government policy at the level of daily life a questionnaire was administered to 68 men and women at the village of Tongoleleka. This provides evidence of the medicalisation of daily life and its impact particularly on Tongan women.