Lack of concentration in resource sectors

A comprehensive overhaul of the mining industry is needed to boost dormant and untapped production in individual sectors, says Savenaca Narube, a local economist and leader of the Unity Fiji party.

“This is an opportunity we have missed for a very long time,” Mr Narube told the newspaper.

“The budget mentions developing certain industries, like manufacturing. That’s fine. But we’re missing that, which is obvious to the naked eye. There’s no focus, no innovation, no transformation in the way we develop our resource-based sectors.”

He said that subsequent budgets, even those passed by the previous government, continued to ignore the mining sector.

“We haven’t even begun to touch it (our natural resources). We’re funding existing programs for it, subsidies here, subsidies there, we’re not addressing the whole issue of how do we increase production.”

The former governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji said that with the income gap between the rich and the poor growing, the mining sector was key to closing the gap.

“When we use our resources, a large portion of the income will go to rural people and this will close the gap because it will increase the potential income of landowners and resource owners.

“We need to move to the level of commercial production.

“We have surplus labour in the villages, they can be retrained, they don’t need much training, so it’s quite an easy profit we can make,” Mr Narube said.

He added that this was the basis for his optimism that Fiji could achieve annual growth of five per cent, as well as halving the 16-year period planned by the Coalition government to reduce Fiji’s debt-to-GDP ratio to 60 per cent.

Production in the mining sectors has been in steady decline for decades, with the Bureau of National Statistics’ production data showing that most industries, such as sugar, gold mining, copra and rice, have reached their lowest levels this decade compared with their heyday in the 1970s.