A complete overhaul of the resource industry is needed to unlock the potential lying dormant and untapped in its sectors, said local economist and Unity Fiji party leader Savenaca Narube.
“This is an opportunity we have been missing out on for a very long time,” Mr. Narube told this newspaper.
“There’s mention in the budget about growing some industries, such as manufacturing. That is fine. But we are overlooking this, which is staring us in the face. There’s no focus, no innovation, no transformation in how we develop our resource-based sectors.”
He pointed out that subsequent budgets, even those by previous governments, have consistently ignored the resource sectors.
“We haven’t even started to begin to touch our natural resources. We are funding existing programs, with subsidies here and there, but we’re not tackling the entire issue of how we raise production.”
The former Reserve Bank of Fiji governor emphasized that with the increasing income disparity between the rich and the poor, the resource sectors hold the key to closing that gap.
“When we use our resources, many of those incomes will go to those in the rural areas, and this will close that gap because it will increase the potential income of landowners and resource owners.”
“We need to move towards a commercial level of production. We have the excess labor in villages; they can be retrained with minimal training, making it an easy gain for us,” Mr. Narube said.
This, he added, forms the basis of his optimism that Fiji can achieve an annual growth of five percent and reduce to eight years the 16-year timeframe planned by the Coalition Government to bring down Fiji’s debt-to-GDP ratio to 60 percent.
Production in the resource sectors has been on a continual decline over the decades. Bureau of Statistics production data shows that most industries, such as sugar, gold, copra, and rice, are at their lowest levels this decade compared to their heydays in the 1970s.