Cover Report
Fiji's Economy Bounces Back
However, there are worsening national problems
Fiji's newspapers daily report a cascade of worsening national troubles.
Police claims of falling crime figures are a matter of public disbelief.
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Tales of violent armed robberies, with daylight attacks on hotels, banks, shops and Big Mac outlets appear in newspaper reports each week.
Scores of householders are the victims of hooded arm gangs who batter through doors and windows of houses and then tie up and terrorise families as they rob them.
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The police force is begging for $3 million needed to buy patrol vehicles. Householders who frantically telephone the local police stations for help get the response: "We can't come unless you send us a taxi. We've got no transport."
The government is grappling ineffectually with multimillion-dollar corruption in the agricultural, public works and fisheries departments. What is known is just skimming the surface.
Ineffectual efforts to prosecute a $240-million national bank scandal have finally collapsed. The scandal will ultimately cost taxpayers at least F$500 million.
Depending on whose figures are accepted, between 33 and 50 percent of Fiji's people live below the poverty line and utter destitution is mounting.
The Fiji Trades Union Congress says a minimum weekly wage of $134 is needed for family with two or three children.
Labour Minister Kenneth Zinc says the minimum wage that trade unions want would cause the closure of garment and other factories that employ several thousands of workers since they couldn't compete against rival foreign manufacturers.
Of the 17,000 annual school-leavers, no more than 8000 have any hope of finding a job.
Politics are wrecked by wrangling over racial discrimination in favour of indigenous Fijians and the hot topic of conditions for the lease by non Fijians of Fijian-owned clan land.
Fijians own nearly 90 percent of all land. Many of them are reluctant to renew the expiring leases of land they don't need to use.
Shining above this doleful landscape of woes is one undeniable fact.
Fiji's economy is one of the strongest, diversified and dynamic ones in the Pacific Islands.
After a coup in 1987, it proved to be a remarkably resilient economy.
Since the coup of May 2000, it has stormed back with greater speed and resilience, although it would have been doing far better if there had been no coup.
On May 2, the Reserve Bank said economic growth for this year was estimated to be 5.1 percent, down from a previous estimate of 5.7 percent made last November before the impacts of SARS, the Iraq War and cyclone damage in January occurred.
The bank said with four percent growth each for 2001 and 2003, "economic performance since 2000 has been exceptional. There are encouraging signs that investment is picking up."
But there's little doubt that really heavy investment the country needs and can attract won't happen until investors can gauge the repercussions, good and bad, of the court ruling expected this month on whether the country's government is constitutionally proper. The repercussions could restore Fiji's stability, which is what investors want, or wreck it again.
On May 23, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific released its 2003 report. This rated the Fiji economy as doing "much better" than other South Pacific economies.
Fiji's government has set a target of five percent annual growth, the rate that must be achieved if worsening rates of unemployment and destitution are to be beaten, it says.
With the exception of the withering sugar industry, the country's core businesses (tourism, gold mining, tuna fishing and canning, timber, and garment manufacturing) are doing better than expected.
Emperor Gold Mines in May announced it would invest F$90 million in expanding its Vatukoula gold mine in the next three years The national airline, Air Pacific, says prospects for tourism warrant an investment of F$1,300 million (about US$600 million) in new aircraft, the largest single commercial decision ever taken in Fiji.
Construction is picking up and some large Indian-owned businesses have recovered enough confidence in the country's future to resume investment in multi-storey office and shopping centres, supermarkets, hotels and manufacturing enterprises.
Last year's count of 397, 859 visitors was 14.3 percent over the 2001 figure. The Fiji Visitors Bureau says the world SARS panic and impact of the Iraq War will cut tourism arrivals this year by only one percent, far less than forecast earlier.
But resilience could flounder again - just one case of SARS, a Bali-like terrorist attack and another local political crisis.
