Finance isn’t just money — it’s raw power, wielded by banks as unyielding enforcers. From colonial plunder of Fiji’s abundant resources to the US dollar’s waning dominance amid BRICS’ assertive realignments, global finance has long decided who thrives and who struggles. Today, Fiji stands at a critical juncture.
Imagine a Fijian fisherman hauling in his daily catch, only to pay double for fuel as distant bankers manipulate markets.
Or a mother, barely making ends meet, choosing overpriced imported noodles while our fertile fields lie fallow. No economics degree needed — every Fijian intuitively knows the true wealth in our soil and seas. Let’s trust that wisdom.
Colonial legacies and banker blueprints have shackled us to volatile imports and mounting debt, transforming quiet prosperity into a vise of expensive dependence.
But this global shift is our chance. Fijians can break free by elevating the vanua — our communal lifeblood — above sterile GDP figures. Reclaim sovereignty through self-reliance: cultivate economies rooted in our lands and oceans, where resilience grows from the ground up.
Yet, to grasp how deeply these chains have embedded, we must trace their tightening grip through decades of misguided reforms — starting with the industry that once sweetened our independence.
The 1980s: When banks dismantled our sugar industry
In the 1980s, sugar was Fiji’s economic spine, employing one in eight workers. Manoa, a cane farmer from Lautoka, supported his family and educated his children through his harvests. But banks had grander designs.
The IMF and World Bank, via “structural adjustment” programs that slashed tariffs and subsidies to integrate into global markets, forced these cuts. Their 1995 report touted new exports but overlooked how these reforms starved farms, with production halving since 2000 due to climate and market pressures.
WTO accession in 1996 exposed Fiji to a 36 percent EU price cut in 2005, slashing farmer incomes by around 40 percent according to trade data, and crashing output from 4.38 million tonnes in 1996 to 1.6 million by 2022.
The ADB’s support to Fiji totals nearly $1 billion in loans, grants, and technical assistance since 1970 — but much has funded roads, ports, and tourism over sugar infrastructure, leaving 200,000 Fijians like Manoa jobless as fields withered.
As sugar’s collapse rippled outward, the banks’ playbook evolved, layering new pressures on other pillars of rural life — turning a single industry’s fall into a cascade of economic vulnerabilities.
2000s–2010s: Taxes and imports drown dairy and more
The pressure continued unabated into the new millennium, where fiscal tweaks and trade pacts further eroded the foundations of self-sufficiency.
In 1992, VAT was introduced at 10 percent, taxing every sale — like Manoa’s dalo at market. It rose to 15 percent by 2009, compelling villages to pursue cash over communal sharing and eroding vanua bonds.
The World Bank’s 2016 review conceded harm to farmers but pressed for deeper market liberalization. Trade pacts like PACER Plus allowed Australia and New Zealand to swamp us with dairy, wheat, fruit and meat — over $F1.1billion in food imports in 2023 alone.
Our once-proud dairy sector collapsed under the influx, leaving half our farmland idle and over 5000 youths emigrating yearly for overseas work, fracturing families.
These mounting burdens didn’t ease with time; if anything, global shocks like COVID amplified them, exposing the fragility banks had helped forge — yet their prescriptions remained stubbornly unchanged.
2020s: Overlooking our crisis
COVID devastated tourism, which accounts for 40 percent of GDP, erasing swathes of the economy.
Families suffered, yet banks provided scant relief. The IMF’s 2021 report advocated further market openings, despite prior admissions of yield-damaging policies.
The World Bank’s 2023 assessment urged cutting sugar subsidies amid public debt exceeding 80 percent of GDP in 2025, while the ADB’s 2025 Outlook funneled millions into urban projects, bypassing villages.
Coastal fish stocks, essential for families, are significantly declining — yet banks emphasise export regulations over reef protection. Over 50,000 Fijians emigrated between mid-2022 and late 2023, many permanently.
Beyond these broad strokes of neglect lies a pattern of outright reversals — policies that banks once championed with zeal, only to abandon when consequences mounted, leaving Fijians to pick up the pieces.
The banks’ flip-flop policies
Banks tout expertise, but their contradictory counsel has burdened Fijians with the fallout.
First, in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank urged dismantling the Fiji Sugar Corporation’s cane rail for “efficient” trucks under structural adjustments.
This modernised transport but clogged roads with heavy vehicles, hiking farmers’ fuel costs and eroding margins by up to 20 percent for smallholders in Vanua Levu, hastening sector collapse as mills ran at losses.
By 2025, with soaring fuel and emissions woes, these same bodies now push rail revival in Fiji’s NDP 2025–2029 — reversing course after decades of rust and debt.
Second, the ADB poured over $200million into tourism loans from the early 2000s onward (totalling over $200m by 2020), branding resorts Fiji’s “golden ticket.”
These funded luxury hotels in Nadi and Denarau, swelling visitors but neglecting rural farms and yielding volatile jobs. Post-COVID’s 73 percent earnings plunge in 2020, the ADB’s 2023 reports suddenly championed agricultural diversification—after starving it for years.
This tardy shift disregards enduring scars: mangrove erosion from coastal sprawl heightens flood risks for inland growers, while the pivot reeks of post-crisis patching.
Third, the World Bank’s 2009 VAT hike to 15 percent (from 12.5 percent) aimed to widen the tax base amid deficits, but it hammered rural households, inflating basics like dalo and fish by 2.5 percent and pushing farmers into cash-chasing formalities.
It deepened urban-rural rifts, with migrant remittances propping up families as 5000+ youths fled annually. Yet the 2025 Outlook proposes rural VAT cuts to 12.5 percent, glossing over a decade of depleted savings and rising NCDs from uncompetitive local produce.
Fourth, IMF-backed urban education loans in the 2010s — over $100 million by 2018 — tilted toward tourism training, sidelining rural ag skills and fueling 50,000+ emigrants in 2022–2023. Resources flowed to city colleges, underfunding village schools and spurring overseas migration.
Now, 2025 reports tout rural STEM—not for import substitution, but to feed schemes like PALM and RSE, sustaining brain drain and remittance dependency over homegrown fisheries and farming talent.
Fifth, in the 1990s, IMF and World Bank structural adjustments gutted rice subsidies and tariffs, flooding markets with cheap imports and slashing local output from a 1987 peak of 33,000 tonnes to under 8,000 by the 2020s — devastating smallholders, abandoning paddies, and saddling Fiji with 90 percent import reliance at millions in annual forex costs.
Framed as efficiency gains, it bred food insecurity and rural exodus. Yet by 2025, these same lenders back rice revival in Fiji’s NDP 2025–2029 via irrigation schemes and tech, with $115 million budgeted for ag self-sufficiency — a stark reversal ignoring decades of engineered dependence.
Sixth, in the 1980s, IMF and World Bank structural adjustments stripped away subsidies and tariffs for the coconut sector, unleashing a torrent of cheap imported oils that cratered local copra production from a mid-1980s peak of around 25,000 tonnes to under 5,000 by the 2010s — devastating smallholder families, shuttering mills, and inflating Fiji’s oil import bills amid volatile global prices. Pitched as liberalization for efficiency, it accelerated rural decay and plantation abandonment.
Yet by 2025, these institutions pivot to champion coconut revival in Fiji’s NDP 2025–2029, promoting value-added processing like virgin coconut oil exports and “re-tapping” the industry with millions in non-sugar crop funding — a blatant U-turn after fueling the very neglect they now claim to fix.
This inconsistency serves banks well: it fosters dependence on loans and imports, profiting from our volatility. Each U-turn spawns fresh funding — truck loans for wrecked rails, recovery aid for tourism busts, stabilisation for VAT strains, vocational fixes for education voids, revival grants for starved rice fields, and processing boosts for forsaken coconuts — perpetuating fees and debt with zero reckoning for human toll.
But enough of the damage cataloged — what if we flipped the script? Fiji’s NDP 2025–2029 offers not just critique, but a roadmap to liberation, where vanua reclaims the wheel from banker whims.
Reclaiming our future
Fiji’s NDP 2025–2029 isn’t just a plan—it’s our battle cry for sovereignty. Gauge wealth by true assets — vibrant reefs, rich soils, cohesive families — via MPI, GPI, and GEP metrics that prize food security, community, and ecology over GDP illusions.
To avert such flip-flops and safeguard against future missteps, enact a Prosperity Impact Test: assess fiscal risks, food/energy independence, financial sovereignty, health/wellbeing, innovation, security, and national autonomy — greenlighting only vanua-fortifying deals. Fijians, demand this now: rally your chiefs, farmers, and youth to hold leaders accountable.
Here’s the urgent path — act today, or tomorrow’s chains tighten:
m Ditch all detrimental trade agreements and deals: Withdraw from all trade deals that flood our markets with imports we can grow or produce ourselves, starting with PACER Plus and extending to any agreements that undermine local agriculture and fisheries. Renegotiate or exit pacts that prioritise foreign subsidies over Fiji’s self-sufficiency, such as those enabling cheap dairy, rice, and meat inflows from Australia and New Zealand. This will protect our farmers, revive idle farmlands, and redirect resources toward homegrown staples like rice, root crops, and livestock—ensuring our economy serves vanua first, not distant markets.
m Revamp food systems: Convert 1,193 villages into community-led ag and blue economy hubs. Allocate $F500million to resurrect rice, swap wheat for millet, scale coconut oil, and boost poultry, goats, pork, and beef. Erect greenhouses, hydroponics, orchards; restore fisheries and dairy for self-sufficiency.
m Solar surge for energy autonomy: Cut Fiji’s $US716 million refined petroleum imports in 2023 by harnessing ~5 kWh/m²/day solar potential. Roll out 15 kW systems for homes, schools, villages; subsidise EVs; permit FNPF solar withdrawals.
m Youth and local empowerment: Forge villages as agro-processing, entrepreneurship, and renewables centers. Redirect education to local ventures and skills. Seed R&D in crops/renewables. Cap PALM/RSE to retain talent. Young Fijians: Reject overseas schemes — build here, lead tomorrow’s hubs.
m Foster healthy lifestyles: Combat diabetes/NCDs via local fresh foods, junk import bans, and community sports/cultural initiatives. Families: Boycott processed imports—reclaim your plates and health.
m Climate fortification: Advance vanua-smart ag—resilient crops, flood-resistant greenhouses, reef rehab — financed by luxury import levies. Coastal guardians: Mobilise for reef clean-ups — defend our blues.
m Safeguard communities and EEZ: Spawn youth ventures in ag, fisheries, energy. Train maritime monitors for Fiji’s 1.3 million km² EEZ against IUU fishing and trafficking. Warriors of the sea: Enlist in patrols — secure our waters.
m Tax lavish, spare locals: Channel luxury duties to solar, processing, health, and resilience. Taxpayers: Demand audits — ensure the elite foot the bill for our rise.
m Holistic India alliance: India’s agri, renewables, fintech, health, education, security, and infra expertise make it Fiji’s ideal partner. With 2025 summit pledges on renewables, this non-imperial, grant-heavy tie can revive dairy/fisheries affordably, trading in rupees to dodge dollar debts. Diplomats: Fast-track rupee trades — lock in the deal by year’s end.
Envision Manoa’s village reborn: cane and pawpaw fields lush, youth bottling coconut oil and guarding reefs, solar-lit homes, families feasting on fresh fish, bonds forged in sports. This isn’t a dream — it’s your mandate. Join the Vanua Rising movement: Share this call, host village forums, pressure Parliament. The time is now.
With this vision in mind, let us circle back to the heart of our story — not just the losses we’ve tallied, but the enduring truth that has always defined us.
Our wealth, our way
Banks have gutted industries, addicted us to imports, taxed villages — to fatten outsiders. Their reports admit the wreckage: vanished jobs, barren lands, sundered families. They tally lives in GDP; our riches dwell in vanua — lands, seas, kin.
In the 1980s, Fiji neared food and energy self-sufficiency. Bank policies flipped that: gutting farms, taxing traditions, tethering us to imports and debt in pursuit of illusory high-income status — risking affluent villages turned destitute.
This stranglehold is calculated, profit-fueled erosion of vanua autonomy, swapping serenity for servitude. Yet Fijians can snap it by heeding vanua over GDP, blueprinting NDP as sovereignty’s manifesto.
What a needless tragedy. The NDP 2025–2029 must shatter this loop, restoring vanua rule where real wealth resides. Banker edicts end here. Vanua leads the way — Fijians, stand strong: Call for the plan, demand the check, and build our unbreakable future. Fiji rises free and fierce —vinaka vakalevu to all who fight for us.
n SUNIL CHAND is an engineer, educator, and economic commentator with 30 years of experience in manufacturing, regulation, and higher education. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of this newspaper.
