Pacific Islanders working for their futures

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Climate change and disasters continue to threaten peoples’ livelihoods and wellbeing in the Pacific Islands.

Jon Naupa, a Kava farmer in Vanuatu, tells the BBC’s Frey Lindsay how difficult it’s getting to break even at the moment. In response to the challenges, young Pacific Islanders are taking advantage of regional labour mobility schemes to make money and help their families. Australia's Pacific labour mobility schemes have seen tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders filling job shortages in Australia, particularly in the agriculture sector.

Telusa Tu'i'onetoa, a PhD candidate at Australian National University, explains how the schemes are supposed to work, and the impact the separation has on families. We’ll also hear from Fiona, a young mother of two working in South Australia. While the schemes offer the chance to earn money at a time when opportunities are limited at home, they are also areas with high risk of exploitation and abuse of vulnerable workers. Tukini Tavui, the CEO of the Pacific Islands Council of South Australia, tells Frey how they work to help protect workers, and what he’d like to see done to help workers break the cycle of wage dependency.

(Picture: Samoans picking fruit in Australia; Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Frey Lindsay.
0:10.3	This is the sound of Carver route being strained and washed in the South Pacific Island
0:14.4	nation of Vanuatu. Carver, for those that don't know, is a plant that is processed into a drink
0:19.7	quite popular across the Pacific and a strong export for Pacific farmers. But carve has been facing some challenges lately.
0:27.2	You've got what I call them the more robust carvers. You've got your beers, you've got
0:32.1	your wines, you've got your whiskeys, you've got your champagne. I love, for example, a kind
0:37.1	of carver called mellow meello. It's what I call
0:38.9	my champagne carver. This is John Nauper. He's a carver farmer in Vanuatu. He told me how these days
0:45.6	he's having to default more and more to more resilient, let's say lower shelf strains of
0:50.2	carver and rely less on those more premium strains like mellow mellow mellow i have planted in the past
0:56.6	and got an 80% success rate now it's down to about 40% 30% so i'm just going to wipe mellow mellow
1:05.3	now there goes to champagne i'm going to concentrate on another variety of carver. It's more robust. It's what I call
1:11.9	a beer carver. I'll get 80% survival. So I'm going to stick with 80% survival. It's just not
1:17.7	able to survive the big changes in the weather here. In last week's program on the challenges
1:22.3	facing the Pacific Islands, we heard how climate change and disasters are affecting people's livelihoods,
1:28.7	from tourism to subsistence farming to commercial agriculture. Now, John's been seeing this firsthand as the weather
1:33.6	cycles grow more unpredictable. It's been a very gradual change. You have to expect patches of
1:40.8	weather that are abnormal, as in warmer months during the cooler days and cooler days
1:46.2	during the warmer months, things that you just don't expect that wreak havoc with say fruiting,
1:51.4	flowering and fruiting. Sometimes it comes up in a month that you totally were not expecting
1:55.8	it to happen and you just sit back and wonder why, you know? And what's that doing to jobs and prospects in Vanuatu,
2:02.9	like the future of agriculture? It's making it harder to succeed. And when things become hard,
	...

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