Introduction

By W. Jayaweera, Asia and Pacific Desk, Communication Division,
T.Virtanen, Regional Communication Adviser.

The Pacific islands comprise twenty two countries and territories covering 30 million km2 of the world largest ocean. Small land masses dispersed over vast areas and the small communities with limited economic resources have caused a number of challenges to communication development in the region. Overall, most pressing issues can be summarised as follows: o The countries of scattered islands face distribution problems for print media. The high cost of paper, printing, and distribution keep the circulation low. o Television is rather new and not widely spread. Where exists it is largely concentrated in the urban areas and few places with electricity. The local TV production is expensive. Most programmes are from foreign sources. o Outside the urban centres, radio is the most penetrated and widely used medium. However, funding for public radio continues to be a major problem, particularly when many broadcasting organisations do not have substantial advertising markets. Furthermore public funding for broadcasting is increasingly becoming a low priority. o The small economic resources are insufficient to support much needed upgrading to obsolete media production and transmission facilities. o All media suffer from the lack of professional staff. The countries themselves have limited capacity to train the journalists. Newcomers, therefore , have little or no journalistic experience. On the other hand career opportunities are rather limited and lead to the drain of staff to other fields. UNESCO has been in the forefront in supporting the Pacific media development. The IPDC extrabudgetary projects implemented in last few years show an increasing demand for the modernisation of media production, local content on television, news exchanges, and a regional wide approach to train media professionals. Increasing number of projects have been implemented to computerise existing radio newsrooms. Therefore, there are more opportunities now to share and exchange digitised information within and between the Pacific island countries. A number of regional and in-country projects are being implemented to build endogenous capacities to increase local media productions and to establish regional programme exchanges. The training of communication professionals has been carried out through regional projects implemented in collaboration with major regional training centres, professional associations and the Universities of South Pacific and Papua New Guinea. The challenges of communication development in the region are immense. So far it is mostly through the IPDC that UNESCO was able to mobilise support for communication development in the Pacific. In view of the UNESCO 's special initiative to « Focus on the Pacific» there is a greater need for concerted efforts to solicit other extrabudgetray resources to support the communication development in this unique region of our planet.