Pacific Plan: Vehicle for development or ghost bus?

Foundation of the Peoples of the South Pacific executive director Rex Horoi has called on Pacific leaders and the forum secretariat to ensure that the priorities, needs, and aspirations of Pacific peoples are central to the Pacific Plan.

FPSP represents non-government organizations in 10 Pacific island countries,

In the run up to forum officials’ committee meeting to be held in Suva, Fiji, next week, Horoi has urged leaders to consider taking the time and providing the resources required for an inclusive consultation process that reaches the majority of Pacific islanders who live in rural, often isolated areas.

“If the Pacific Plan is as important as its architects maintain, then we have much to gain from taking the time to get it right, but we have much more to lose by rushing to Papua New Guinea and getting it wrong,” Horoi said.

The draft of the Pacific Plan details an action plan to strengthen regional cooperation and pool the scarce regional resources of governance in the Pacific. The plan is a result of the 2004 Auckland Declaration and will be presented to island leaders in Port Moresby, PNG, for their endorsement in October.

While acknowledging that there have been limited consultations in each of the forum member countries, Horoi argued that the consultation process needed improvement if the plan was to avoid being a “ghost bus” that “we are not sure where it is going, we don’t know the driver and there are serious questions as to who is fuelling it.”

In response to forum assertions that the Pacific Plan is a “living document” and that consultations will carry on for years to come, Horoi states that “from experience as ambassador at the United Nations [for Solomon Islands], once a document is endorsed, substantial changes are unlikely.”

“A plan that is so important for people of the Pacific islands has had far too little input from the community level, Horoi said. “Scant resources have been allocated to the consultation process, and the time frame is unrealistically short.”

FSPI asserts that there is virtually no mention of communities or poverty apart from the suggestion that trade, private enterprise, and other neo-liberal policies will solve the communities’ problems. “We are not sure whether the current draft has been written by Pacific islanders or for them.”

Horoi’s comments reflect concerns at the national level about the lack of effective participation. Fiu Mataese Elisara, executive director of Ole Siosiomaga Society, Samoa, argues that there has been a “flawed process” with an “underlying push for quick ‘endorsement’ by our peoples,” while John Roughan of the Solomon Islands Development Trust worries that the plan was “conceived by outside interests, voted on by the Pacific’s elite and now held up as the document for the future—all without much input from the region’s non-state actors, NGOs, churches, and the most important group, the people of the countries involved.” (PR)