2011 Inaugural Address By The Honorable Sebastian L. Anefal ...

In the first half of fiscal year 2008, we faced a major dengue fever outbreak andcoupled with the rebuilding of public infrastructure facilities destroyed ordamaged by Typhoon Lupid since 2003 and Super Typhoon Sudal in 2004.Consequently, some 423 public assistance projects out of a total of 607 projectsfunded by FEMA after these two natural disasters, at a cost of over $17.50 millionremained to be implemented. More significantly, we had to contend with animposed air carrier embargo and with the remnants of the bombing of the WorldTrade Center in New York City, now known to everyone as “9/11”. Immediatelyafter this event, we suffered roughly a 20 to 30% reduction in our tourism and thecorresponding loss of revenues, which aggravated the earlier revenue loss fromthe closure of the only garment factory in the State. Moreover, the wars inAfghanistan and Iraq, which have continued to adversely impact tourismthroughout the world for a long period of time, have not been of any help to tinyisland economies, and Yap is no exception.In between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we also faced the impacts of theEnron and Worldcom collapse, which further restricted our Compact investments,and the California State dock workers’ strike and Typhoon Ponsanga in Guam thatdisrupted shipping and goods to the islands that resulted in further reduced localrevenue collections. After our economy finally started to show signs of minuteimprovement, we were then severely hit by the world-wide H1N1 epidemic,which eventually required that we take restrictive measures towards all incomingvisitors from near and afar. The impact of this action was quite severe on ourtourism industry and once again on our national revenue share.8