THE Democratic Coalition for Change Government (DCCG) is fully aware of its responsibilities to fully utilize the country’s area of strength to revitalize and progress the economy in the Resources and Productive sector.

Prime Minister Hon Manasseh Sogavare made the statement in his Sine Die speech.

Sogavare disclosed in his speech that there are serious reforms underway in the forestry sector and the thinking of sustainable development in the forestry sector is something the Government has been talking about for a while.

He then added that this includes some of the policy decision and intentions of the Government that were basically left suspended.

“The active downstream processing, setting aside a quarter of logs that were harvested for downstream processing, for example and of course there is much talk about possible transfer-pricing.

“We will, for the benefit of everyone, be requiring an investigation on these areas.

“I would like to believe that when we talk about harvesting our logs, we talk about areas that are loggeable,” said the Prime Minister.

As for fisheries, the Prime Minister added that it is a growing area that gives big revenue to the Government and that the DCCG has a very competent Minister managing the responsible Ministry and this sector in general.

The Mineral Sector, the Prime Minister disclosed, is the taskforce that is established to look at the new mineral policy that will eventually come to Cabinet to deliberate on.

The Agriculture Sector is a sector that our people are actively participating in, right down at the village level.

“If we talk about active participation by the people, it is happening in this sector and we have emphasized this to our friends in Australia and New Zealand under the PACER Plus that if they actively open their doors to allow our cassava and taro commodities to enter their markets, we will have addressed in a big way the active participation of our people in export- oriented economic activities.

“Of course, the bigger Agriculture development is the Palm Oil extension on east Guadalcanal and we thank the people of east Guadalcanal for opening up their land for that development to take place,” said Hon Manasseh Sogavare.

There are about 17,000 of additional hectares of Palm Oil that cover four constituencies.

The Prime Minister then made strong acknowledgement and thanked landowners on East Guadalcanal for willingly allowing their land and actively participating in this development.