N.Z. Food Airlift To Hurricane-Swept Fiji Isles

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22819, 14 December 1948, Page 5

N.Z. Food Airlift To HurricaneSwept Fiji Isles

(10 a.m.) SUVA, Dec. 13. The Royal New Zealand Air Force yesterday started an “airlift” to the hurricane-devastated islands of the eastern portions of Fiji.

A Catalina flying-boat will make ihree trips daily for three days carrying emergency food supplies from Suva to the isolated Fijian communities in the Lau Group.

A preliminary aerial survey yesterday revealed that many of the most productive islands in Fiji resemble Tarawa and other West Pacific islands after full-scale air and sea bombardments during the war. No copra is likely to come from Lau —one of Fiji’s largest copra areas—for three years. The hurricane was the worst since 1912. Village after village has been demolished,- food crops destroyed and coconut groves stripped or uprooted. The island of Tavenuni, north of Lau, has lost between 50 and 75 per cent of the 1949 copra production. The hurricane is a major disaster to Fiji’s copra industry which is about two-thirds Fijian and one-third European, planters were only just beginning to benefit from the high post-war prices after many years of a depression. No overall estimate of the loss is yet available.