Fiji’s first settlers arrived from Melanesia at least 3,500 years ago.
The Lapita people brought a wide range of food plants, pigs, and the distinctive pottery they are named after. Mostly early settlers lived in small coastal communities, but as time passed there is increasing evidence of inland communities. Prior to European arrival ridge forts were common, indicating conflict was an important factor in location of settlements where early land users practiced a slash-and-burn type of subsistence agriculture. The fertile delta regions of southeast Viti Levu supported larger concentrations of population based on intensive taro cultivation using complex irrigation systems.
The discovery of sandalwood in southwestern Vanua Levu early in the 19th century lead to a rapid depletion of the accessible commercial stands. By the 1860s another wave of European settlers arrived intent on establishing cotton plantations to capitalize on a boom in cotton prices caused by the American Civil War.
Fiji became a British Colony in 1874, and policies to encourage economic development lead to the introduction of indentured Indian labourers and investment by the Australian Colonial Sugar Refining Company to establish sugar plantations and processing mills. Sugar production is concentrated on the seasonally dry western side of Viti Levu and in the area around Labasa. For much of the country’s post-independence period (since 1970), sugar accounted for more than half of Fiji’s exports. Indentured Indian labourers had been encouraged to remain in Fiji and many had become small holders in that sugar industry. In the early 21st century, however, international pressure brought about reforms in the EU sugar subsidies, which reduced Fiji’s income from sugar forcing structural changes aimed at increasing productivity from the best land.
Large-scale systematic planting of pine forests beginning in the 1960s developed a timber industry for domestic use and export.
The Fiji agricultural sector still involves a substantial subsistence sector dominated by indigenous Fijians. Subsistence farmers earn supplementary cash income from cultivating copra, cocoa, kava, taro (locally called dalo), pineapples, cassava (manioc), or bananas. Ward (1965) reported that the distribution of the major commercial crops was related more to the absence of alternative cash crops than to the particular climatic or locational suitability, and with rice it depended on the distribution of the Indian farmers rather than suitability of soil and climate in the producing areas
Present land use patterns are the result of this complex land use history, external economic influences particularly relating to sugar subsidy reforms, and to native land tenure systems and more recently the Land Use Decree 2010.
