STUDENTS PICKET MISSION

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 1

STUDENTS PICKET MISSION

Foreign investment is taking over Fiji, according to a group of Fijian students from Canterbury University, who picketed the hotel where a Fijian trade mission was staying last evening. In a pamphlet distributed to people outside the hotel, the students said that the trade mission was in New Zealand looking for trade and investment. “What kind of investment does Fiji need? The type of investment in Fiji business aiming for ever increasing returns by the substitution of labour for capital. Fiji needs this employment,” the pamphlet said. The picketing was not intended to be a protest, according to one of the students. He said the picketers were seeking information. The pamphlet asked whether rights were to be sacrificed for foreign investors who manipulated them, such as the big Australian companies which had the whole of the South Pacific economy at their mercy, and could increase prices' as they wished. ’‘Small businessmen in Fiji can be easily bought out by these large companies and forced out of competition, so that the investors are the ones who control the trade,” the pamphlet said. “We want Fiji businessmen to have a greater control of our economy. We need foreign investment to promote our primary industries, and other Governments to open their trade markets to us with a fairer attitude.”