The people of God

RESEARCH TOPIC:

CUSTOMARY LAND AND INDIGENOUS

ENTREPRENEURS: UNDERSTANDING

HOW CUSTOMARY LAND IS AN

EFFECTIVE MEANS FOR ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT IN FIJI

I shall be asking how can iTaukei

entrepreneurs’ social, cultural,

environmental and economic

customary practices inform how

economic development is

measured and theorised?

“THE LAND HAS EYES AND TEETH”

External commentators have argued that customary owned land is a barrier to development.The lack of private ownership they argue prevents development in Fiji.

Vanua: the inter-connected relationship of land, spirituality, culture, history, and people, and how this forms the foundation for Fijian culture, society and economic development

"More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery…Their economic life is

primitive and stagnant.

Their poverty is a handicapand a threat. . . What we

envisage is a program of development...”

“There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments.Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated.”

“…two billion people became underdeveloped .

. . from that time on, they ceased being what

they were, in all their diversity, and were

transmogrified into an inverted mirror of

other’s reality: a mirror that belittles them and

sends them to the end of the queue, a mirror

that defines their identity, which is really that

of a heterogeneous and diverse majority,

simply in the terms of a homogenizing and

narrow minority.”

Mark 6: 1-8

Is your person lowly?