CLOSING DOWN CEREMONY FOR PACIFIC NUCLEAR TEST SITE

["Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@aecl.ca>]

http://pidp.ewc.hawaii.edu/pireport/2000/June/06-30-13.htm
PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT
FRENCH ARMY TO HOLD CLOSING DOWN CEREMONY FOR PACIFIC NUCLEAR TEST SITE
PAPEETE, French Polynesia (June 29, 2000 - Oceania Flash/SPC)---The French
army will conduct a ceremony Saturday to mark the final shutdown of its
controversial nuclear testing facility in French Polynesia, the daily
newspaper La Dépêche de Tahiti reports.
The ceremony will officially wind up the Centre d'Expérimentation du
Pacifique (CEP) and will be conducted by Commodore Chéné, who is the CEP
Commander.
Top military officials also will attend.
France ended its nuclear tests on French Polynesia's atolls of Moruroa and
Fangataufa in 1996. Since then, the CEP has been dismantled, marking the end
of a thirty-year nuclear era in the French Pacific territory.

http://pidp.ewc.hawaii.edu/pireport/2000/May/05-29-02.htm
PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT
FRENCH POLYNESIA: LIFE AFTER TESTS
By Robert Keith-Reid
SUVA, Fiji Islands (May 26, 2000 - Islands Business Magazine/PINA Nius
Online)---Although nuclear weapon tests at Moruroa atoll ended permanently
in 1994, the 222,000 inhabitants of French Polynesia must wait for many
years more before escaping from the fallout of the economic effects of the
bomb.
Thirty years of tests brought billions of dollars into the territory. But it
also led the territory into an artificially high lifestyle, a grossly
distorted economy, and, according to an April 1998 exchange rate survey, the
second most expensive Big Mac in the world.
In Papeete, a Big Mac costs $US 3.39, which was 33% higher than in the
United States, 79% more than in New Zealand, and 94% more than in Australia.
Dr. Bernard Poirine, associate professor of economics at the Univérsité
Française de Pacifique in Tahiti, said a high standard of living makes
tourism more competitive and the economy less dependent on French aid.
He said the territory needs to accept a hefty devaluation of its currency,
the Pacific franc; abolish all import duties; get France to cut the salaries
of French state bureaucrats working in the territory by 30 percent; cut
public debt; retire civil servants; lower company taxes; and subsidize the
promotion of tourism and air services.
Writing in the latest edition of the Australian National University's
Pacific Economic Bulletin, Poirine also suggested that the territory
subsidize the cost of such imported necessities as sugar, rice, condensed
milk, butter and instant coffee. He also said food stamps should be issued
to poor families.
Poirine said the growth of French Polynesia's main industry, tourism, is
stifled by high costs, making trips to the French territory too expensive.
Tourism has to be far more competitive, he added.
As for exports of cultivated black pearls, worth over $US 140 million a
year, he said: "Unless a radical change in policy takes place it is doubtful
that pearl revenues will grow much more in the future."
Furthermore, he said, competitors such as the Cook Islands are moving into
the black pearl market.
In 1959, before nuclear tests began, French Polynesian's traditional exports
were enough to pay 95% of the cost of imports. By 1962 the ratio had fallen
to 56% because of the fall of copra, vanilla and mother of pearl prices, and
the termination of phosphate mining.
As nuclear billions distorted the territory's society and economy, French
Polynesia hired a huge, highly paid force of civil servants. By 1996, the
per capital GDP of $US 17, 000 was about the same as Australia's and higher
than New Zealand.
After the end of the tests in 1996, the French government promised to keep
its civilian and military spending in the territory unchanged for the next
10 years. In 1998 French spending was $US 1.22 billion, or $US 5,415 per
head of the population. "The issue is how to compensate for the expected
decrease of transfers after 2005," Poirine said.
As French spending impacted, higher wages for the civil service drove up
tourism industry costs and, with the exception of pearls, civilian exports
dwindled almost to nothing. Costs in almost every other sector were also
driven up since the minimum wage for workers, managers, professionals and
technicians became whatever would be earned in the public sector -- about
twice as much as in metropolitan France.
Obstacles to growth: Since its minimum wage is higher than in the United
States though lower than in France, French Polynesia cannot hope to emulate
Fiji or Mauritius by attracting industries to open in a duty free
export-processing zone, Poirine says.
High labor costs, an overvalued currency and high cost of airfares from
Japan, Europe and the United States were obstacles to the growth of tourism.
Today, few of French Polynesia's hotels make a profit, despite tax relief
for them and except for a few expensive well-known ones they suffer low
occupancy rates.
After 2006 French Polynesia can count on maintaining its high lifestyle only
by increasing tourism earnings, Poirine says.
French Polynesia's share of the expanding Asia/Pacific tourism market is
shrinking, he says, because "tourists complain about the high cost of
beverages, food and other items and that very few of them come back after a
first visit."
The only way out of the deadlock, he says, is a 30 percent devaluation
coupled with the simultaneous abolition of import duties and a decrease of
the local cost of the public sector, leaving metropolitan public transfers
unchanged in the Euro until 2006. This would stimulate tourism to produce a
300 percent increase in receipts by 2006.
"The only category of people that would stand to lose from the
implementation of this plan would be French expatriate civil servants on
short-term assignments of usually two to three years."
The obstacle to his ideas, says Poirine, is mainly politics. There was no
need to accept such drastic and politically costly ideas as long as French
aid flowed into the territory.

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