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Maintain mangroves, sustain livelihoods
Mangroves are an essential component when it comes to establishing a healthy coastal marine ecosystem.
The most effective part of a mangrove forest (mangle) is its root system.
They serve as a protection barrier along coastal regions as they prevent sediments from reaching the sea, and soil erosion from tidal waves.
Mangrove roots offer a habitat for young aquatic organisms.
In areas that the mangroves roots are permanently in water, they are the host for many marine organisms.
More than that, they have served as source of livelihood (firewood) for many families, especially in the more rurals areas of Fiji.
Man collecting mangrove firewood for cooking
However, the cutting of mangroves around the country has brought about the need to renew Fiji’s current Mangrove Management Plan, as it was out of date an ineffective.
The Director of Lands and Surveyor General Mosese Tagicakibau highlighted this concern at the Environment Impact Consultation Training Workshop last month.
“The Ministry has a current mangrove management plan that already exists which was published in 2005, and it is out of date now, and so we are putting together a new one due to the increase in new issues that are arising from the cutting of mangroves,” Tagicakibau said.
He added that approaches to the issues of mangrove deforestation that were overlooked in 2005 would be added to the new plan.
This new Mangrove Management Plan would mean that people would have access to information that specifies when people can harvest mangroves, the various species of mangroves, and the various ways the Ministry planned to introduce policies to rehabilitate and sustain mangroves.
The Ministry of Lands is working together with the founder of Environmental Consultants Fiji Limited Doctor Dick Watling to compile this Mangrove Management Plan 2013 which will released this June.
The yays and nays for gays in NZ
So the gay marriage bill has just been passed in New Zealand, this means that the definition of marriage in the eye of the law will no longer be regarded as that between a man and a woman, but rather two human beings.
The bill was constructed and put forward by Labour MP Louisa Wall, and won by 77 votes to 44 – a landslide victory that was celebrated by many in parliament that day soon after the results were read out.
This all may seem as a great change and step forward for New Zealand and the Pacific, but not everyone is on board with idea of gay marriage – or even gays in general.
Obviously there are people (some of whom I know) who cringe at the idea of two men or two women expressing their affection for each other, but I thought that we are in a day and age where this sort of thing was ‘accepted’. Apparently not.
These ‘haters’ main argument is that marriage is between a man and a woman – and that’s it! Call a same sex union by any other name but not ‘marriage’.
I do understand this – not really, but I do acknowledge their opinions.
This gender issue they argue seems quite irrelevant if you take into the bigger picture, which is that what really matters about an individual is what’s inside his or her heart. Not their status, their wealth and certainly not their sexual orientation.
So if two people love each other then they the should be able to express that.
The really sad this is that studies have shown that same-sex couples are more interested in getting married and seeing through that till-death-do-us-part commitment in comparison to heterosexual couples.
Even more surprising than this is that a study conducted by a professor at Tufts University, in the United States, has revealed that children who are raised by same-sex couples are just as happy as, and in some cases even happier than, those brought up by straight couples.
Benjamin Siegel, who is the director of developmental and behavioural pediatrics, told Boston University Today that there is no correlation between the development of a child and the sexual orientation of their parent or parents.
“Many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is affected much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents,” he said.
Cash to card…and back to cash again
When it comes to shopping today, the internet has made it as simple as clicking ‘add to shopping cart’ and charging to a bank account, or has it?
Going through clothes’ racks, picking a few options and trying them on is quickly becoming an endangered phenomenon around the world.
Although the majority of Fiji is still strongly rooted in ‘tactile shopping,’ many people in Suva, Nadi and Lautoka are looking to more online-based retail stores, or ‘e-tail stores.’
But making that shift from cash to card has not been as easy as it seems.
Many of these buyers in Fiji are young people– mostly women – and a select few can and do buy with a Visa or MasterCard.
However, amongst these young people, the vast majority are students or unemployed, and essentially do not make enough income to allow them the ‘luxury’ and convenience of a credit card.
Many banks in the country, like ANZ and Westpac, require their customers to earn at least $30 thousand a year before they are eligible to apply for a credit card.
Young e-tail shoppers have the option to ask their parents for their credit card details, or, in some cases, can turn to retail shop owners who make personal online purchases on their behalf.
Real killings. Fake witches.
The closest I have ever come to witchcraft burnings were in the words of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” back in high school, but who knew it was happening right next door in Papua New Guinea – obviously they did, but why now have they decided to address the issue?
A couple of days ago two women were tortured and killed in Lopele village in Bougainville after an angry group of men accused them of witchcraft.
The group of men believed that the two women murdered a teacher at the vilage school in Lopele by means of sorcery, and took justice into their own hands.
Police tried to intervene and save these women, but were forced to give them over to the group of men after they were attacked at their station.
Police reported that these women were tortured with knives and axes, before they were brutally decapitated.
Nearly all the ‘reported’ cases of sorcery in PNG have been against women. The level of violence against women in PNG is extremely alarming and is one of the highest in the South Pacific, with the percentage of women who are domestically abused in the rural areas being 100 per cent.
This is not the first time sorcery killings have been reported in the PNG, this is so far the fourth or fifth.
Just last month, six women and a man were grabbed during an Easter Witch-hunt in the Southern Highlands. They were stripped, tied up and tortured with hot iron rods against their genitalia. The man managed to escape and survive, but whether these women are alive or dead is still unknown – hopefully it’s not the latter.
In February, a 20 year old woman was doused with petrol and burned alive by the family of a dead boy, who claimed she had use some sort of witchcraft to take his life
In July last year, 29 people who referred to themselves as a “gang of witch hunters” were arrested for killing women, and taking part in cannibalism.
The worst thing about this is that accusation has more weight than fact; once someones cries witch, you’re guilty – not even that, you’re just dead.
A legal prostitute is a happy prostitute
It is the oldest form of work in the world and it is also the longest running ‘profession’, but will we every see a day – or night in this case – where our streets are free from prostitutes or rather people that won’t have to sell themselves for sex services to make ends meet.
This has always been a controversial topic around the world, and Fiji has taken its own stance on whether or not prostitution or sex trade should be legalized.
Saying whether or not may seem quite pointless now because back in 2010 the Fiji government had enacted a new anti-prostitution law, but I’m not entirely convinced that they really had an open mind to the various advantages – yes, there are advantages to this.
There was, however, speculations that the government would change this, but sadly they are completely against the legalisation of prostitution.
Although I believe that prostitution is immoral, I do believe that it should be legalized with various legislation put in place to control it.
This would definitely go a long way in reducing the criminal act. Hopefully, this would greatly stop or reduce the abuse of young girls who are sold into prostitution. An additional benefit of legal prostitution would be that there could be health requirements that would greatly reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
There is a difference between prostitution and human trafficking, and that is that with prostitution there is an understanding of what you are doing and and that you are doing this to make money for yourself – it is more an individually driven act, whereas human trafficking is forced onto a person and they gain no ‘benefit’ from it -there’s no choice.
Legalizing prostitution would not solve the problem of sex trafficking because sex trafficking caters to a different crowd. Sex traffickers cater to a much more perverse group of people than many of those who participate in prostitution. The sex trafficking industry often involves sex with minors and children and other perverse acts that happen in the illicit sex trafficking industry where people are kidnapped and forced into sex slavery.
In Fiji, this year there have been several cases of underage prostitution and alleged human trafficking and a lot of these cases were reported in the Western Division – Suva too, but mostly in Nadi and Lautoka. I hate to make the correlation, but it seems this is happening in the more tourism concentrated area of the country.
Divisional Police Commander West Senior Superintendent of Police Jope Ralulu recently spoke to the Fiji Times about the growing concern of prostitution in the area, how these people – mainly women – turned to this lifestyle because of financial instabilities, and how police planned to confront and resolve the issue by finding them another means of income.
“We are also talking with government stakeholders in seeking advice to find ways that we can address people who are engaged in prostitution because the overall thinking is that they are people who are from very poor backgrounds so we need to look for other alternatives or ways that we can help them,” he said.
Facebook helps confront “Police Brutality in Fiji”
Facebook has recently brought to knowledge a video that highlights an issue that needs to be confronted and addressed by the public and government of Fiji.
This video, titled “Police Brutality in Fiji” has gone viral on the social networking site.
The nine-minute video shows two men, who have been identified as escaped convicts, restrained and tortured with various implements and a guard dog by a group of men (assumed to be police and military personnel).
It is a display of the worst side to human nature, or in this case ‘inhumane nature’.
In my opinion I understand that, yes, these men are criminals and did escape from prison, however, this is not reason enough for this group of men to take the law into their own hands and act above it.
The entire video was in Fijian, and I did not understand what was being said – but I did not really need to – and I think that if I did, the video would have probably been more disturbing.
The most disturbing part of all was the fact that these group of men were laughing and seemed to enjoy torturing the two escapees.
I don’t want to justify their actions, but I think that it is also important to consider what why these men have done the things they have done – there must be some reason, something must have made them tick.
I don’t believe a person would cause such harm without reason.Some people argue that the escapees in the video deserved what they got, because they knew of the operations of the police force and that such an act would happen. This is the only time people have actually seen this with their bare eyes.
The last time it was said that police brutality was used in the recapture of prisoners was last year.
This was when five men escaped prison and upon recapture when they had to show for trial, two men were severely beaten, one of whom was bludgeoned to death and also had a severed leg to which the police and military argued that they were ‘resisting arrest’.
It really is appalling and shameful.
The video is a violation of human rights, and has caught the attention of many regional and international organisations, like Amnesty International, so it seems that this won’t be something that would be easily put aside or overlooked.
The things that these men have done will forever be remembered, but more than that they have tarnished the image that people will have of the police and military in Fiji, who are supposed to be the people who uphold the law and keep us safe.
EDWARD TAV, FIJI 