Priorities and Action Agenda 2006 – 2015.

The National Vision of this Agenda bears the title “An Educated, Healthy and Wealthy Vanuatu” and establishes that by 2015 Vanuatu will have achieved a significant increase in real per capita incomes, along with steady growth in levels of employment. Within the region, Vanuatu will be among the leading countries in achieving the Millennium Development Goals in education, health, environmental management, and other key social indicators. Public sector reforms will have raised standards of governance, levels of productivity in the civil service, and will have resulted in higher standards of services and managerial accountability. Through continuing structural reform, Vanuatu will have established an effective enabling environment to sustain the significant private sector growth, which it aims to achieve in output and employment.
The main agendas for action include growing the productive sector, especially agriculture and tourism, maintaining macroeconomic balance, raising public service performance, cutting costs associated with transport and utilities, and improving access to basic services such as health and education.
The following priorities have been established: 1). Improving governance and public service delivery by providing policy stability and fiscal sustainability via a strengthened law-enforcement and macroeconomic management capacity and a small, efficient, and accountable government; 2) Improving the lives of the people in rural areas by improving service delivery, expanding market access to rural produce, lowering costs of credit and transportation, and ensuring sustainable use of natural resources; 3) Raising private investment by lowering obstacles to growth of private enterprise including lowering costs of doing business, facilitating long-term secure access to land, and providing better support services to business; 4) Enabling greater stakeholder participation in policy formulation by institutionalising the role of chiefs, non-governmental organisations, and civil society in decision- making at all levels of government; and, 5). Increasing equity in access to income and economic opportunity by all members of the community. Specific areas of focus include: enabling universal access to primary education by school-age children, universal access to basic health services, and inducing increased employment opportunity for those seeking work
Chapter 6 provides for the primary sector development and the environment. In particular, it lays down provisions relating to agriculture, forestry and fisheries. Moreover, this Chapter deals with the environment and disaster management. As far as fisheries is concerned it is suggested that the fisheries resources are not being properly exploited. he reef fisheries are over-fished in some areas, notably in the vicinity of Efate, but are generally under-exploited near the outer islands. The deep water snapper resource has the potential for some further exploitation but there appear to be definite limits. The Fisheries Department does not have the resources to properly monitor the tuna catch in Vanuatu waters. The water temperatures, however, are such that it appears unlikely that massive numbers of tuna frequent the area. Improvements in catching, handling and marketing systems and commercialisation of the domestic fishing industry are badly needed, but the fisheries resources are probably not sufficient to supply a larger proportion of the protein needs of a rapidly growing population from local fish stocks and to sustain the limited fisheries resources.
To develop a sustainable forestry sector shall depend on attracting investors for developing larger commercial timber plantations. A parallel opportunity for development lies in organising and empowering mobile sawmill operators to expand into value adding wood products processing. Vanuatu possesses soils and climate that are conducive to timber production. The challenges for this sector will include ensuring replanting of trees at a rate at least equal to the volume being harvested; to foster utilisation of additional species; and to develop additional value-added processing.
Vanuatu has one of the most conducive environments in the world for raising beef cattle. Domestically the production of beef, pork, poultry and sheep/goat for local consumption forms an essential part of the rural economy. Any improvement in the capacity of farmers and their communities to produce, process and sell these animals and products would have a positive effect upon rural farmers incomes, and offer opportunities to promote rural enterprises such as butcheries. Improvements in domestic livestock production and processing would also improve the level of food security and safety in rural communities, while promoting the substitution of local meat for imported products
Improved livestock production shall be obtained through: 1) Improved extension services to livestock; 2) Better access for smallholder farmers to credit; 3) A program of breeding improvement. Expansion of other livestock shall be reached through: 1) Promoting the use of goats as a food animal; 2) Development of locally produced feed rations for poultry and pigs.
The text consists of 9 Chapters as follows: National Vision and Development Overview (1); Medium Term Strategic Framework (2); Private Sector Development and Employment Creation (3); Macro-economic Stability and Equitable Growth (4); Good Governance and Public Sector Reform (5); Primary Sector Development and the Environment (6); Provision of Basic Services and Strengthening Social Development (7); Education and Human Resource Development (8); Support Services: Infrastructure and Utilities (9).