Premier Of Niue Calls For Refocusing Of FEMM

Premier Of Niue Calls For Refocusing Of FEMM

Alofi, Niue, 27th October 2010

The Premier of Niue, Hon. Toke Talagi and Chair of the 14th Forum Economic Ministers’ Meeting (FEMM) which got underway here this morning, says FEMM needs to be re-focused more on economic issues and their impacts on the region’s developments.

Opening the Meeting this morning, Premier Talagi, who is also Niue’s Minister of Finance told the Forum Finance Ministers: “It is my belief that FEMM meetings have been meandering and needs to be re-focused on economic issues and their impacts on our developments. This is not apportioning blame on you or anyone, but an attempt on my part in reaffirming the purpose of FEMM.”

“FEMM belongs to us Ministers dealing with critical economic issues affecting us all. If our economies are weak and lack of critical focus, everything else in and within our communities will not be strong or healthy either. It is our responsibility to decide and determine what the FEMM agenda shall be and our duty to report the outcomes and findings of our meetings accordingly to the Forum Leaders,” said Premier Talagi.
He told FEMM the challenges the region face with respect to the current worldwide economic and financial crisis have had varied impacts on the region’s local economies.

“It is clear that those who depend on tourism and remittances as well as exports to larger economies have had a rough time. To date, our responses have been varying according to each country’s dependency on these outside forces. It remains clear however that this downturn has affected us all in one way or another.

“The challenge now is to determine how we can better focus our attention to the responses that are needed to ensure that we can ride out this crisis which appears to have continued despite our best efforts and the best efforts of much larger economies such as America, Japan, EU and including New Zealand and Australia to minimize the impacts of the this downturn,” Premier Talagi said.

He told FEMM that for many of the Forum countries their expectations were to turn to the region’s donor partners for support but the donors themselves are struggling.

“Therefore, we must look to ourselves to determine what we need to do to ensure that we minimize the impacts that this will have upon us. Many of us have already taken definitive steps to adapting our structures and process in response, some of us, have yet to do so. Therefore the theme of this meeting, broadening the economic base and growing our economies, must now turn to projects such as building the infrastructure which will enable us to respond quicker to any recovery that may occur.

“That is the challenge before use; we need to work closely with donors, financial institutions and our multilateral partners to provide whatever support they can provide us. We must also focus our attention to encouraging and providing incentives to our private sector partners, so that they too can respond to the challenges that we face,” said Mr Talagi.

After the officially opening of the 14th FEMM this morning, Ministers went into the plenary session which will last the whole day. They go on their retreat tomorrow at the Matavai Resort.

ENDS

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