By Kirsty Needham
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka will attend a presidential prayer breakfast in Washington on Thursday, the first opportunity for a Pacific Islands leader to press the region’s aid and climate priorities with the Trump Administration.
Community groups across the Pacific Islands, one of the world’s most aid reliant regions, are scrambling to find ways to pay staff after U.S. funding was frozen, organisations in Fiji said.
Analysts warn U.S. aid cuts targeting clean energy risk damaging the United States ability to compete with China in the strategic region, where almost half of pledged aid is climate related.
China is the second-biggest bilateral donor to the Pacific Islands after Australia, a Lowy Institute report on aid to the region found in November.
The U.S. State Department last week gave “clean energy programs for women in Fiji” as an example of aid that did not make America stronger, in a statement announcing a blanket aid freeze.
The program singled out is run by the Fiji office of the Pacific Community, the Pacific’s largest intergovernmental organisation, Reuters has confirmed, and provides families with access to cooking and water in a region where 65% of the population don’t have electricity.
The Pacific Community reports to 27 Pacific Island governments and declined to comment.
Documents show it received $1.5 million from the U.S. State Department for energy programs targeting women, including giving families biogas fuel stoves for cooking meals on remote atoll nations such as Tuvalu, and solar technology for water pumps.
Most Pacific Islands import energy at high cost, so renewable energy is needed to provide basic services to villages, said Meg Keen, the head of Pacific Research at the Australian National University.
The region’s top donor Australia requires gender goals in all aid grants over AU$3 million.
“Women are the ones who are working to find food, we are the ones who go further to find water, so anything we do on climate change and disaster response has to be gender responsive,” said Noelene Nabulivou, a climate activist and feminist who runs the independently-funded DIVA for Equality in Fiji.
Nabulivou said she is getting calls from women’s groups across the Pacific who can’t pay staff because of the U.S. aid freeze. A permanent bar on women’s projects will “will have massive impacts in the region,” she said.
U.S. SOFT POWER AT RISK
The U.S. provides 8% of aid into the Pacific, and although island states could turn to other donors, cuts to U.S. aid would undermine U.S. security goals, Keen said.
“The whole point of the United States coming back into the region was for soft power and influence and this is not going to help”, she said.
Fiji is indebted to Chinese state banks after decades of infrastructure lending, and was a focus of the former Biden Administration’s efforts to compete with China, which is pressing for a greater security role in the Pacific Islands.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) re-opened its Pacific office in Fiji last October after a decades-long absence, as Washington sought to bolster defence ties with Fiji to counterbalance China’s influence in the region.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tasked by U.S. President Donald Trump with downsizing the federal government, announced this week that USAID would be shut down.
Rabuka’s office said he would meet with Republican senators Mike Lee and Kevin Cramer in Washington as well as attending the prayer breakfast, where Trump is expected to give a speech.
A Fiji government statement said Rabuka will advocate for an “Ocean of Peace”, referring to Fiji’s policy opposing an arms race in the Pacific.
“I look forward to discussing issues of common interest not only for Fiji but also the wider Pacific region,” Rabuka said in the statement.
(Reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by Michael Perry)
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