Secretariat of the Pacific Community
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SPCFlag.GIF
The Secretariat of the Pacific Community or SPC is a regional intergovernmental organisation whose membership includes both nations and territories. It aims to "develop the technical, professional, scientific, research, planning and management capability of Pacific Island people and directly provide information and advice, to enable them to make informed decisions about their future development and well-being." [1] (http://www.spc.int/role.htm)
SPC was founded in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission by six developed countries with an interest in the region:
For reasons either of reduced development interest in the Pacific Islands region or a desire to concentrate assistance in other areas of greater poverty, two of these founder members have since withdrawn from SPC: the Netherlands (1962-) and the United Kingdom (1995-98 and 2005-).
SPC's founding charter is the Canberra Agreement (http://www.spc.int/coastfish/canberra.htm)
The SPC work-area includes the following Pacific island countries and territories, which since 1983 have been full members:
American Samoa, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna.
Apart from Tonga, these were all territories of the original founder members of SPC, but most are now independent.
From the start, SPC's role was constrained, and the invitation from Australia and New Zealand to the USA, France, Netherlands and Britain to participate in a South Seas Commission Conference in 1947 included the statement that "the [South Pacific] Commission to be set up should not be empowered to deal in any way with political matters or questions of defence or security". This constraint on discussion (particularly the constraint on discussing nuclear weapons testing in the region) led, eventually, to the creation of the South Pacific Forum, which not only excluded the more distant "metropolitan" powers of France, UK and USA, but also their Pacific Island territories.
SPC today is the oldest and largest organisation in the 10-member Council of Regional Organisations in the Pacific (CROP), a consultative process that is headed at the political level by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. Since the hand-over of coordination of regional political issues from the SPC Conference to the South Pacific Forum in the 1970s, SPC has concentrated on providing technical, advisory, statistical and information support to its member governments and administrations, particularly in areas where small island states lack the wherewithal to maintain purely national cadres of expertise, or in areas where regional cooperation or interaction is necessary.
SPC currently provides advisory services to its members in Fisheries [2] (http://www.spc.int/mrd), Forestry, Women's Affairs and Community Education, Youth, National Statistics and Demography, Cultural Affairs, Agriculture, Biosecurity and Public Health.
SPC was the first CROP organisation to be headed by a woman. Lourdes Pangelinan of Guam is the organisation's current Director-General.