Co-Operative Action

Provides Land For

Fiji's Landless

From a Suva correspondent Five years ago 19 Indian farmers and their families were given notice to quit their farms in the Nabaka area of the

Sigatoka Valley, one of Fiji’s few

rich arable areas.

THEIR land was to revert to “Native Reserve”, and unless a near-miracle happened they would be homeless.

No near-miracle did happen unless you could describe the action those Indians took as a near-miracle.

What they did was to forsake their usual isolationism and to form a co operative society to buy a stretch of 453 acres to give them their own permanent homes.

By doing so they lit a beacon to point the way for other land-hungry settlers.

Their idea has caught on and the land-purchase co-operative movement is spreading in Fiji with the aid of the colony’s Co-operative Depart ment, which has moved in fast to spread the gospel of co-operation among the landless, and to clip the wings of the loan vultures and land speculators.

Now. other groups, small and large, European, Indian and Fijian, all with an ambition to own their own land as the common denomina tor, are casting around for land available for purchase.

Thriving concern

The Fiji co-operative settlements are societies of individuals who form themselves into co-operative societies to provide themselves with negotiat ing strength and a pooling of re sources to raise money to buy the land.

The Nabaka farmers formed their society with the help of landless brothers and sons and, 38 strong, they put down the purchase price of £B,OOO and moved in.

Their 453 acres were divided into plots of about 12 acres each, and the members of the society moved in after balloting for them. The average cost of the plots was between £230 and £250.

Nine acres went to providing land for a school and a recreation ground

and market. New roads followed, and by June, 1963, the community was a thriving concern.

In less than two years they had banished for ever the threat of be coming homeless serfs and had become a settlement of small capitalists—but with a difference.

The Co-operative Department, quick to see the pitfalls, had drawn up a “constitution” under which the society owned the land, not the members.

Ownership of shares in the society gave the members the right to occupy the land, but not to dispose of it.

The success of the Nabaka farmers’ venture was repeated soon after wards at Drasa, near Lautoka, where

27 sugar cane farmers were faced with an ultimatum from two land lords—to buy the land or get off.

Seizing on the idea of the Nabaka pioneers, they borrowed £65,000 from the Sugar Price Stabilisation Fund Board, raised another £12,000 between them, and bought nearly 2,000 acres.

Land sharks

The Co-operative Department took a very quick hand in the deal as there was danger of the land being bought by land sharks, share croppers and the like, and the farmers would have been ousted or at the mercy of new landlords.

“So far,” says Mr. Shardha Nand,

the Acting Deputy Registrar of C operatives, “the members have prow their ability to live under strii financial discipline and are success fully translating the idea of mutm self-help into a reality.”

Other landless farmers have sinr co-operated to buy the land undb their feet to provide a roof ow their heads.

Farmers in the Sigatoka Valid only recently emulated their neigs hours example and successfully closed a deal; and, at the time i writing, 40 men on the island .

Ovalau were waiting to draw lots id plots of land in the lovely valle' of Lovoni, in Ovalau’s long-des; volcanic crater.

Multi-racial

The 40 members of the Lovoic Valley Land-Purchasing Co-operativi Society have formed a body whio is unique in Fiji. It is a multi-racii land-owning unit of 16 landles Fijians, 14 Europeans and pan Europeans, and 10 Indians, whose formation could mark an importau milestone in Fiji’s road into tH future.

The unit is raising more thas £B,OOO to buy land from Mom Hedstrom Limited at about £4/2.; an acre—the cheapest freehold lam in Fiji.

Its members will grow fres vegetables for Ovalau, where suo

articles—home-grown—have alway

been scarce.

Another land-purchasing co-operr tive society is currently waiting fo a clearance from a governmen department before settling a dej involving £250,000-worth of land no far from Suva.

All this spells hope for the lano hungry people of Fiji and the gov< ernment recognises its importance bd making laws to control the new units —not so much to confine them tt their own narrow sphere, but tt protect their land from the sharks.

No member of a unit will be abll to sell the land, or his share, anr nobody, not even the law itself, wili be able to take over his share foD debt.

Taking the long view of all thisi Mr, Shardha Nand sees flourishin.r groups of economically-educated im dependent farmers who have learm the benefits of co-operation as an instrument of progress, better farim ing, better business and better living “They will have achieved these,, he says, “with maximum efficiency; at minimum cost”.