NLTB demanded landlords refuse lease consent

Issue No: 325; 29 December 2000

 
Over the past year, the Native Lands Trust Board has been having meetings with landowners asking them to not to consent to the continued leasing of their land to tenant farmers.

The revelations come in the wake of increasing landowner dissatisfaction with the NLTB on the significant decline in the rental revenue which some landowners have begun receiving.

One Vanua Levu landowner challenged the NLTB to ensure that he will continue to receive the same level of rental income if he did not consent to leasing his land. Reportedly when the NLTB could not give this assurance, he lashed out at the NLTB officials present at the meeting. This incident happened some months back but has been revealed only recently. It confirms the allegations by other ethnic Fijians, including Party of National Unity's Ponipate Lesavua, that the NLTB has deliberately tried to mislead the landowners into thinking that by not leasing out their land, they will overnight become large-scale commercial farmers.

The political agenda that the NLTB had is further revealed today by a report in the Fiji Times where the NLTB is reported to have now started visiting landowners again in Vanua Levu to ascertain whether landowners need the land for their own selves. Earlier, the NLTB has stated that it had already done this exercise and it was the wish of the landlords to not to renew leases. The latest move by the NLTB is seen as a face-saving gesture on the part of the NLTB.

Meanwhile the Fiji Times has also reported the NLTB's spokesman as saying:
"There have been many cases where the landowners go back to the tenants and ask for work and we're trying to reverse that and I think that's what most tenants cannot accept".

The NLTB aimed to achieve this reversal by issuing tenants residential leases and getting them to work as wage labourers on the land which they previously farmed. This plan was rejected outright by most farmers. But in an interesting twist, the NFP backed Fiji Cane Growers Association has started to support the scheme. Today's Daily Post reports the Association's Acting Secretary as urging all farmers whose leases are expiring to apply for residential leases.

 

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