Issue No: 612; 21 March 2001

Today's Daily Post reports that the NLTB has found it difficult to get ethnic Fijian landowners to cultivate land and pay the NLTB the necessary rent. The paper quotes NLTB's Western Division head as saying:
"Our concern is that the land should be available for maximum use with all concerned parties reaping the benefits. We have come to see that a number of landowners who came in as incoming farmers hardly do any work on their farm and the farm is left redundant. If this trend continues then firstly the landowners will be affected, the sugar industry will be very badly affected as well as the NLTB".

The paper also quoted the official as saying that the "incoming farmers have to prove themselves otherwise the NLTB will terminate their leases and the contract".

The NLTB had grand plans to take over the land farmed by largely the ethnic Indian smallholder tenants, give the tenants quarter acre residential leases for the same total rent as the agricultural leases, amalgamate the small farms into larger farms, give the larger farms to ethnic Fijian landowners who will utilise the largely ethnic Indians as labourers on the farms. It was expected that in this way, the ethnic Indians will be converted into farm labourers, the NLTB will continue to get the necessary rental, and the ethnic Fijians will prosper commercially. It was also expected that this move will see the ethnic Indians becoming politically subservient, and ethnic Fijians continue to back the SVT regime. The plan was drawn in the mid 1990's by Maika Qarikau, who now is the General Manager of the NLTB. Qarikau is related to the former SVT PM Sitiveni Rabuka, and is a prominent supporter of terrorist George Speight.

The plan has backfired. First, most tenants have refused to accept residential leases. This is despite the Fiji Cane Growers Association, an arm of the National Federation Party (which was in coalition with the SVT), advising the tenants to accept residential leases. Second, many landowners do not want to give residential leases because after constant promise of material wealth by the NLTB, they wish to take over the existing residences of the tenants rather than the agricultural land. In the cases which NLTB has seen so far, invariably the landlords have started occupying the residences of the tenants and have left the farms to wilderness.