The nation's pain remains!

J. Roughan

11 August 2010

Honiara  

Congratulations Solomons!  Voting for the 9^th parliament members went off smoothly. Yes, we experienced a few hiccups in the vote counting in a few places but the process itself was straight forward, professionally handled and successfully completed. So congratulations one and all!

 

But the country's major worries—the growing number of poor people in the country, illiteracy of so many of our citizens especially the women and fewer and fewer jobs for young people—have not gone away. In fact, these worries and a host of other problems over the past few months have grown more severe while the nation focused its energies and attention on the election process. The nation's pain remains!

 

That is why, while the newly elected members are trying to choose a new Prime Minister over the next two weeks, these same members must also focus their attention on national problems as well. Their own constituency, however, over the next few months should necessarily take a back seat to national issues. These very national issues, in many ways, lie at the root of many local problems.

 

Take the poverty issue, for instance. SIDT has been tracking how the shortage of modest amounts of money among the typical citizen has been affecting their lives since 1989. That's more than 20 years now! While the services of education and health have sometimes scored over the 50% mark a few times in these past 20 years, the one critical area of ordinary life, the availability of money, has remained stubbornly low. Last year's Report Card on the Sikua Government shows that thousands of Solomon Islanders scored the government with only a 45% mark. Since 1989, moreover, no sitting government has ever scored even a 50% mark.

 

No member on his own, no matter how gifted, how well resourced, can adequately respond to growing poverty levels of our people. Raising people out of the poverty trap is never accomplished by funding individual piggery, copra/cocoa drier, cattle, etc. projects. No! Poverty is a profound deeply seated national issue and parliament alone is best placed to address it through its legislative power and oversight of government's job creation work. 

 

For instance, job creation—on the national and international levels, village and constituency levels, rural and urban—can best be accomplished by vigorous parliamentary action. On the national level, for instance, a parliamentary push to put teeth into a food production economy could yield many new employment opportunities at the village, district and national levels.  

 

At present, each year in fact, many villages across the nation produce tons and tons of mangos, pineapples, lemons, etc. However, this super abundance happens during a short three month period . . . November, December and January. Villagers, one by one, descend upon local markets, all at the same time, to sell their wonderful tropical fruit. There's been little effort to add value to this valuable product.

 

Yet, we know that if these fruits could be processed—add value by extracting its juice to produce fruit ice blocks—villagers' return on their fruit product would jump in value. Rather than feeding our children on sugar, colouring and water ice blocks, the villager could produce a nutritional fruit drink, something much healthier for them.

 

In other words, the entire fruit production chain—harvesting, juice extraction, different and new uses of the juice, sale of fruit juice—could create jobs at the village and district levels. This same process could be duplicated with other foods—root crops, nuts, shell fish, fish etc.—so that the Solomon Islands food production ability could be at the centre of an expanding job market of food preparation, storage, transport and experimentation.

 

The village farmer, most often the woman, is a Solomons response to the need of the private sector to become the most productive job creator as in other parts of the world. Village life is the normal location of the factors for all livelihoods: land ownership, rich soils, ample rain, skilled personnel, a ready and willing work force, etc.   

 

Recognizing a nation's strength—the growing ability to produce ample amounts of food for an expanding population—is not a plan to keep our people 'down on the farm'. On the contrary! It's a workable plan to buy time so that this platform supports other works—schools, community work, local jobs, etc.—to ease the nation's pain.