tively in a white short-sleeve shirt and brown business skirt or sulu
vakataga. He sports a neat graying mustache, wears glasses, and has
the cautious manner of bureaucrats throughout the world, which
makes what he has to say all the more disturbing.
“We can feel a change already in our weather system here, with
longer droughts that impact our western division [on the main island],”
Nasome tells me. “We’re having more rain, more rainy seasons with
higher rainfall and flooding has spread to the western side of the
island, which is normally known as the dryer part. And this coral
bleaching is a new area of concern, and is on a more extensive scale
than we’ve ever seen before.”
The manager of the Jean-Michel Cousteau dive resort on the island
of Vanua Levu, the second-largest of Fiji’s more than three hundred
islands, recently began complaining about the state of the road into the
upscale retreat. He claims it is in such bad shape visitors may not want
to return to Fiji (if the daily newspaper reports of arms smuggling and
a possible coup do not scare them off first).
While promising to improve the road, the public works minister
points out that this has been one of the rainiest years ever, and bad for
roads throughout the islands. Two weeks earlier, Labasa, the main
town on Vanua Levu, flooded. A year ago the cities of Nadi, Ba, and
Lautoka in the western sugar-growing region of Viti Levu also suffered
major flooding. This followed an 8-month drought that devastated the
sugar industry.
“Seasonal shifts are becoming more extreme,” Janita Pahalad, the
manager of climate services for the Fiji Meteorological Service, tells
me. “Another problem is that with global warming, night-time tem-
peratures are increasing, but the sugar industry needs low night-time
temperatures to increase the sucrose content of the cane.”
Pahalad has written a report suggesting that rising sea levels from
global warming are also leading to increased salt water intrusion into
water tables, changing the pH level of low-lying sugar fields, which can
drastically reduce their productivity.
On Fiji’s low-lying islands salt water intrusion can come from
above as well as below. On Moturki, a small island not far off eastern
Viti Levu, a 1999 storm surge crossed over the island, ruining the
136 David Helvarg