Fiji Copra Producers
pp. 79-80 · Read in the full issue
[?]ut £97,000 [?] Govt. Loans
Suva, May 21.
ATEST figures released by the 4 Fijian Development Fund Board iow that since tthe Fijian Develop ed Fund came into operation on ugust 1, 1951, a total of £107,117 is been collected from the Fijian >pra producers and the Fund is owing at the rate of more than 0,000 a month.
Of the total of £107,000, no less an £97,940 has gone into the overnment’s Development Loans. ? date not one word has been made iblic regarding expenditure (if any) i any of the purposes for which e fund was instituted.
With most of the fund io date Government Loans, it may be id that, technically, the general jjective is being fulfilled. In the 3rds of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, the >ject of the fund is “to obtain for e Fijian community some lasting nefit out of the high prices being id for commodities, to bring the arketing of all economically im irtant native produce under one
control, to gain for the Fijians a better bargaining position in business transactions, and to help the village communities to emerge from the state of sole reliance on subsistence economy.”
A levy of £lO is made on every ton of Fijian-produced copra and, under the Fijian Development Fund Ordinance all payments to the fund are credited to the person or body making the payment and bear interest at 2 per cent. Withdrawals —it is not known whether any have been permitted—can be made only with the consent of the administering board and for a purpose approveJ by the Board.
Ratu Sir Lala, the principal architect of the whole scheme, told the Legislative Council last year that the board would ensure that the owners of the fund provided them selves with better houses, healthier and brighter surroundings, and good and sufficient water supplies before anything else. It was planned, he added, to raise the standard of living of more than 50,000 people (that is, well over one-third of the indigenous Fijians) and ultimately to give the Colony’s economy an extra 7,000,000 working hours a year.
In these terms, the levy of £lO on a return of £65 a ton is certainly
not extortionate, but it looks as if most of the compulsory contributors to the fund will wait a mighty long time before they start to reap the promised benefits.
Mr. R. R. C. Caten has been pro moted Assistant Public Relations Officer, Fiji.
Miss A. McPhee, a trained nurse, who has been working in East Africa and, lately, in Lebanon, reached Sydney early in May on her way to New Guinea. She left for New Britain by air on May 10 to stay with her brother, Mr. Gerald McPhee, planter, of Kokopo.
Mr. G. B. Waring, who was awarded a Colonial Development and Welfare Scholarship in 1949, has returned to Fiji from New Zealand after sucessfully completing a course on surveying. He has resumed work with the Lands Department as a Surveyor.