by Martin Haffner Associate Editor
De-colonising’ aid the call from Fiji’s Biman Prasad Fiji’s Finance Minister Biman Prasad responds to media at the post-Budget press conference.Fiji’s Finance Minister Biman Prasad responds to media at the post-Budget press conference. Photo: Screenshot / Fiji Government
Fiji’s deputy prime minister, Biman Prasad, told an international conference last month in Bangkok that some of the most severely debt-stressed countries are the island states of the Pacific.
Prasad, who also is a former economic professor, said the harshest impacts of global economic re-engineering are being felt by the poorest communities across this region.
He said the adaptation challenges arising from runaway climate change are the steepest across the atoll states of the Pacific – Kiribati, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands.
Prasad said at no time, outside of war, have economies had to face a 30 to 70 per cent contraction as a consequence of a single cyclone, but Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga have faced such a situation within this decade.
He said the world must secure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“There is no Plan B. The two options before the world are to either secure the goals, or face extreme chaos,” he said.
“There is nothing in the middle. Not this time.”
Prasad said there will be extreme chaos if the world goes ahead and uses the same international financial architecture it has had in place for years.
“And if we continue with the same complex processes to actually access any grant funding which is now available, then we cannot address the issue of this financing gap, as well as climate finance – both for mitigation and adaptation that is badly needed by small vulnerable economies.”
More and more Pacific states will approach a state of existential crisis unless development funding is sorted, he said.
Prasad said many planned projects in the region should already be in place.
“We don’t have time on our hands plus the delay in accessing financing, particularly climate resilient infrastructure and for adaptation – then the situation for these countries is going to get worse and worse.”
He wants to ‘decolonise’ aid, giving the developing countries more control over the aid dollars.
This would involve more donor nations providing aid directly into the recipient nation’s budgets.
Prasad, who is also the Fiji Finance Minister, has welcomed the budget funding lead taken by Australia and New Zealand, and said Fiji’s experience with Canberra’s putting aid into the Budget has been a great help for his government.
“It allows us, not only the flexibility, but also it allows us to access funding and building our Budget, building our national development planned strategy, and built in with our own locally designed, and locally led strategies.”
He said the new Pacific Resilience Facility, to be set up in Tonga, is one way that this process of decolonising aid can be achieved.
Prasad said the region has welcomed the pledges made so far to support this new facility.
