Present
Today, the SPC's role has expanded in service to its community. The SPC work-area includes the following Pacific island countries and territories, which since 1983 have been full members:
| American Samoa | Cook Islands | Fiji | French Polynesia |
| Guam | Kiribati | Marshall Islands | Federated States of Micronesia |
| Nauru | New Caledonia | Niue | Northern Mariana Islands |
| Palau | Papua New Guinea | Pitcairn Islands | Samoa |
| Solomon Islands | Tokelau | Tonga | Tuvalu |
| Vanuatu | Wallis and Futuna |
These were all territories (or, in the case of Tonga, a protected state) of the original founder members of SPC, but most are now independent. Dutch New Guinea, formerly represented in the SPC by the Netherlands, was transferred to the United Nations in 1962 and to Indonesia in 1969. Thus, the Netherlands is no longer represented in the SPC since the end of 1962.
SPC today is the oldest and largest organization in the 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 co-ordination 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 co-operation or interaction is necessary.
SPC was the first CROP organization to be headed by a woman, Lourdes Pangelinan of Guam who left the organization end of January 2006. Jimmie Rodgers is the organization's current Director-General.
Read more about this topic: Secretariat Of The Pacific Community
Famous quotes containing the word present:
“The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“I have defeated them all.... I was left with some money to battle with the world when quite young, and at the present time have much to feel proud of.... The Lord gave me talent, and I know I have done good with it.... For my brains have made me quite independent and without the help of any man.”
—Harriet A. Brown, U.S. inventor and educator. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people’s minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.”
—Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)