Paper short abstract:

Disaster relief, development aid, and fictitious commodities: this paper looks into the ways in which mangrove seedlings act as tokens of public money in rural Fiji, and as units of international carbon offset compensations for the Fijian government.

Paper long abstract:

The Fijian government has recently turned mangrove seedlings into a lucrative commodity. In early 2024, numerous rural communities were still trying to come to terms with the fact that this previously useless plant promised to be worth more money than most traditional food crops. At the same time, the Fijian government was also spending money on creating mangrove-reliant livelihoods, from honeybees to fish and shrimp pools, and on planting mangroves to strengthen Fiji’s coastlines against hurricanes and erosion. The common denominator, besides the versatile properties of the mangrove plant, is Fiji’s ambition to increase the country’s contribution for global carbon trading, which the country hoped to join in 2024. In my paper, I examine the combination of commodification-as-redistribution and regional subsidisation using the medium of mangroves, to highlight the particular logic that follows from the Clean Development Mechanism implemented in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. In a nutshell: what a country trades at the international market has to be “additional” to its own naturally-occurring offset capacity.