Tag: nature

• Our Riverbeds Are Speaking. The Pasifika Must Listen.

  In Fiji, this cold season has dragged on too long. Rivers have fallen so low that they reveal small islands no one alive has seen. Dalo crops are stunted.

  This is more than a bad season. It is a warning.

  Our elders knew El Niño long before satellites and forecasting models. They read it in the winds, the rain, the sea and the behaviour of fish. But what is coming may be different in scale and speed. Forecasts have warned of a potentially severe El Niño, with a significant risk of persistence into early 2027 and some possibility of reaching “Super El Niño” intensity.

  For small island states, this is not simply a weather event. It is an existential test.

  The threats are interconnected. Across parts of the western Pasifika, drought could deepen, threatening crops, forests and livelihoods. Elsewhere, intense rainfall and flooding could destroy food crops and contaminate freshwater. A hunger gap can develop quickly.

  Our vulnerability is amplified by dependence on imported food. When global prices rise, the shock reaches directly into Pasifika households. Inflation, malnutrition and water insecurity can follow.

  In the southwest Pasifika, stronger tropical cyclones remain another risk. Warmer seas can intensify coral bleaching, damaging fisheries and weakening natural coastal protection. High fuel costs make emergency response and food distribution more expensive. Heat stress, infectious disease and waterborne illness can compound the damage.

  This is how a climate event becomes a societal crisis.

  Hawaiʻi’s experience of three hurricanes in the last three months should also remind us that geography does not protect us. The same ocean connects us. Climate systems do not respect national boundaries, and neither does vulnerability.

  So what do we do?

  We prepare—but intelligently, locally and collectively.

  Early-warning systems must reach villages, not stop at capitals. Practical tools such as climate animations and community education can help people act before disaster: storing water, preserving food and securing homes and evacuation shelters.

  Governments should pre-position emergency NFI supplies, strengthen water infrastructure, support desalination where appropriate and promote drought-resistant crops. Solar pumps and community renewable energy can reduce dependence on expensive imported fuel. Dedicated disaster funds and accessible insurance are not luxuries. They are instruments of resilience.

  But this cannot be left to individual governments alone.

  This is a collective Pasifika challenge, and the Pacific Islands Forum must step forward with regional leadership. The Forum should help turn national preparations into a genuinely regional response: coordinating early warnings, emergency supplies, food-security measures, technical expertise and contingency planning across our islands.

  From Fiji and Sāmoa to Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea, we should not merely respond separately to the same crisis. We should prepare together.

  A Pasifika that shares knowledge, resources and capacity is better equipped to withstand shocks. And when we speak to the wider world about our vulnerabilities and needs, we should speak with the strength of one people and one ocean.

  But preparation alone is not justice.

  Pasifika island countries have contributed little to the accumulation of greenhouse gases that has produced today’s climate crisis, yet we face some of its most severe consequences. Adaptation finance must reach the communities that need it—not disappear into layers of consultants, administration and paperwork. Loss and damage must provide meaningful support rather than mechanisms that deepen already heavy debt burdens.

  We are not merely victims of a changing climate. We are navigators.

  Our ancestors crossed the world’s largest ocean without modern instruments. They survived by reading the sea, the sky, the winds and one another.

  We can navigate this crisis too.

  But courage alone is not enough. We need knowledge, resources, preparedness and regional leadership. And we need institutions capable of turning our shared vulnerability into shared action.

  The riverbeds are speaking. The signs are before us.

  The Pasifika Islands Forum must listen—and lead.

  We should all listen now, not when the water is gone, the crops have failed and the storm is already at the door.

  2026.09.27

• iTaukei Communalism: Beyond the fear of the word

  In Fiji, “communalism” haunts our public square like a ghost at the feast. Urban, multiracial progressives invoke it with a shudder. For many Indo-Fijians, it still smells of the 1987 coups, the 1990 constitution, and the fear that in a crisis, blood will outrank citizenship.

  But here is a hard truth: communalism in Fiji is not fading. For the iTaukei, it is not a political slogan. It is a philosophy of survival, identity and dignity. To demand that we abandon our communal framework is to ask us to cease being iTaukei. That is neither realistic nor just.

  So the real question is not whether communalism should exist. It is whether Indo-Fijians can learn to read it correctly—not as a threat, but as a different grammar of belonging.

  Anger is not the enemy

  In March 2008, during a firestorm over his pastor’s sermons, Barack Obama did something rare. He did not simply condemn the anger. He traced its roots: generations of racism and neglect, but also the resentment of working-class whites watching their jobs disappear.

  “The anger is real,” Obama said. “To simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only widens the chasm of misunderstanding.”

  Fiji can learn here. Indo-Fijian anger over coups and being treated as permanent outsiders—that is real. iTaukei anger over land alienation, cultural erosion and feeling like strangers in our own home—that is also real. No constitution or national slogan can wish either away.

  What communalism actually is

  Forget the caricature of a nationalist plot. For an iTaukei villager in Ba or Cakaudrove, communalism is the daily reality of veilomani (mutual care), solesolevaki (shared labour) and veivuke (assistance). It is the mataqali holding together families who have tilled the same soil for generations. It is the yavusa deciding together whether to lease land to a sugar farmer or reforest a watershed.

  When iTaukei speak of land or taukei, they are not talking about Western property deeds. They mean Vanua—land, people, custom, ancestors. To be iTaukei is to stand within a web of obligation, never alone before the state.

  What iTaukei communalism seeks is recognition: that our ancestral way of life deserves a place alongside the individualist, market logic that arrived with colonialism and sugar, and is now embedded in our imposed 2013 constitution.

  Why Indo-Fijians misread it

  That misunderstanding is understandable. Indo-Fijians came as girmitiyas (1879–1920), their communal bonds deliberately broken by the plantation system. They rebuilt—through panchayats, temples, sangams—but those bonds were voluntary, not ancestral birthrights.

  Today, Indo-Fijians feel they do not fully belong, yet hold overwhelming economic power. The honest question is: are they willing to share that power in a way that embraces being Fijian in the deeper iTaukei sense? Meanwhile, iTaukei have seen their land and culture stripped away.

  Neither grievance cancels the other. As Obama said: “We can condemn a statement without condemning the person. We can acknowledge the pain of a community without endorsing every word spoken in that pain.”

  Three things thoughtful understanding means

  Understanding iTaukei communalism does not mean accepting racial discrimination or scrapping the common roll. It means three things.

  First, it is defensive, not aggressive. The driving fear is that globalisation, land sales, tourism and climate displacement will erase the Vanua. When an iTaukei elder defends communal land, he is not plotting to expel tenants. He is trying to stop his grandchildren from selling ancestral soil for a resort and a second-hand SUV. Indo-Fijians, with no ancestral land base, can afford to see land as a commodity. iTaukei cannot.

  Second, communalism and multiracial democracy can co-exist—with new institutions. Fiji has never genuinely tried a power-sharing model: iTaukei communal representation alongside common-roll seats, with iTaukei vetoes on culture and land. Instead, we swung from iTaukei-dominated ethnocracy (1987–2006) to a “one man, one vote” system (2013 onward) that many iTaukei see as imposed without addressing our existential anxiety. A thoughtful Indo-Fijian might ask: Is there a middle way that protects my vote and their Vanua?

  Third, iTaukei communalism holds wisdom Indo-Fijians may need. The climate crisis will devastate our coasts and sugar belts. Individualist solutions—buying higher ground, insuring alone—will fail. Survival requires veivuke: collective decisions on relocation, resource sharing, mutual obligation. iTaukei have done this for centuries. Our communal structures could become Fiji’s resilience architecture. Dismiss them as backward, and you walk away from a toolkit that might save your grandchildren.

  The path forward

  Obama ended his Philadelphia speech with this: “I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle. But I do believe that we can get beyond them if we work together.” The Bose Levu Vakaturaga (BLV) believes it is possible. In intergenerational terms.

  No one is asking Indo-Fijians to stop being Indo-Fijian. No one is asking iTaukei to stop being iTaukei. We are asked only to stop seeing each other’s communalism as a zero-sum threat.

  When an iTaukei speaks of Vanua, hear “home”, not “hierarchy”. When an Indo-Fijian speaks of enterprise, hear “aspiration”, not “greed”. These translations are hard. They require humility and discomfort.

  But the alternative is what Fiji has known too long: a politics of mutual suspicion, each community waiting for the other to weaken. That is not a nation. That is a ceasefire.

  The BLV could be one space for translation. A reformed parliament with genuine communal and individual protections could be another. But no institution works if the heart is unwilling—if we refuse to see, as Obama put it, that “we may have come on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now.”

  Indo-Fijians do not need to embrace communalism. They need to understand it—as a living, wounded, hopeful expression of iTaukei humanity. In that understanding, perhaps discover that their own survival is not separate from the survival of the Vanua.

  Same ocean. Same shore. Same storm. Same boat

  The difficulties will pass. But only if we stop rowing against each other, and start rowing toward the same horizon.

  2026.05.12