seems doomed
p. 135 · Read in the full issue
GEIC copra plan seems doomed
From a Tarawa correspondent It’ll be a dismal year for the 4,000odd copra producers of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. With more nuts being consumed for food, especially in the crowded Ellice, and drought effects of ’6B still felt, production is estimated at less than 6,000 tons, a far cry from *67’s all-time high of over 11,000 tons.
Extensive replanting continues on Christmas Island and hopes of seed gardens outside the capital, Tarawa, are real, but no resident will bet that the colony’s 30,000 tons output target by 1975, under its adopted develop ment plan, can be achieved.
There is little real incentive for producers to increase production.
Already one of the most heavily taxed peoples of the Islands, pro ducers receive about two-thirds of the $l5O plus a ton that the government of the GEIC receives for its copra.
In 1970 it is estimated that pro ducers will pay $270,000 in taxes, and earn about $lOO each. Expatriate workers, with government homes and other inducements will contribute about $lBO,OOO to the GEIC Treasury.
Recently, government decided it was not receiving enough tax from larger copra producers. It made abortive efforts to find out who was earning over $6OO a year from copra.
Taxes apart, it is hard to see a great deal of expansion in the GEIC’s copra output. Coconuts are grown along plantation lines only on
Christmas, Washington-Fanning
(Burns Philp controlled) and in the Ellice’s tiny southerly Niulatika atoll. Elsewhere, output is from myriad family plots amounting, in some cases, to three or four trees.
All atolls are crowded, little food is grown besides coconuts and the nuts remain a major source of food.
The Polynesians of the Ellice are now consuming germinating nuts and output from these nine atolls will always be limited by the pressure of population.
'Die Gilberts are less crowded; their northern atolls are wetter and wealthier but in the south the climate is dry and the people poorer.
It is believed that pressure is mounting in Tarawa for a gover ment takeover of the BP operations on isolated Washington and Fanning in the Line Islands, although the colony already gets a rakeoff there —wages for GEIC labourers and export and company taxes paid by the company.