A complete overhaul of the resource industry is needed to lift the production that lies 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,” 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 said subsequent budgets, even those by the previous government, have ignored the resource sectors.
“We haven’t even started to begin to touch that (our natural resources). We are funding existing programs on this, subsidies here, subsidies there, we’re not tackling the entire issue of how we raise production.”
The former Reserve Bank of Fiji governor said 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 rural areas and this will close that gap because it will increase the potential income of landowners and resource owners.
“We need to go on a commercial level of production.
“We have the excess labour in villages, they can be retrained, they don’t need much training so it’s quite an easy gain that we can have,” Narube said.
This, he added, is the basis of his optimism that Fiji can achieve an annual growth of five per cent and also cut in half the 16-year timeframe planned by the Coalition Government to bring down to 60 per cent Fiji’s debt-to-GDP ratio.
Production in the resource sectors has been on an un-arrested decline over the decades, with Bureau of Statistics production data showing most industries, such as sugar, gold, copra, and rice at their lowest levels this decade compared to their heydays in the 1970s.