A woman at a fruit stall in Fiji (UN Women)

In the Pacific women perform much of the subsistence food production, so rising input costs mean lower yields, more labour and food insecurity (UN Women)

The Pacific’s fuel shock extracts a price from women

A fuel emergency is being measured in shipping routes and state declarations – but the cost is landing on women’s time, earnings and safety.

Alison Davidian

11 June 20264 min read

Since April, the price of a litre of kerosene in Fiji has climbed 42%. Diesel is up 35% (Opens in new window), with further increases since. (Opens in new window) Kerosene is exempt from value-added tax precisely because it is the fuel of poorer households – yet of all the fuels, it rose the most.

The shock falls hardest on those who can afford it least, with much of the burden absorbed by women, and it began thousands of kilometres away, in a shipping lane most market vendors in Suva, Honiara and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands region will never see.

Walking through Nausori market just outside Suva this week, you feel it. The stalls are emptier than they should be because fewer women can afford to get there. The trucks that carry produce from farming communities are running less often. What arrives costs more – a sack of cucumbers that sold for FJ$80 has climbed to FJ$150 (AU$96). One farmer I spoke to described it simply. Less fuel, she said, meant less time on the tractor, less ploughing and less selling. A fuel crisis measured in empty tables, missing vendors, and vegetables priced out of reach.

A price shock does not fall on an abstract household. It falls on the people who run the informal economy, who buy and prepare food, and absorb the unpaid labour of holding families together when money runs short. In the Pacific, those people are overwhelmingly women – between 75% and 90% of market vendors across the region (Opens in new window).

A market stall in Tuvalu (UN Women)

The impact has been neither distant nor slow. Marshall Islands (Opens in new window) and Tuvalu (Opens in new window) have both declared states of emergency over fuel and power risks. Pacific governments are searching for ways to stretch dwindling supplies. The region imports roughly 80% of its energy (Opens in new window); it is through freight rates in Asian fuel markets that a Gulf conflict arrives at an island wharf.

Inside the home and on land, the crisis takes another form. The Strait of Hormuz carries a third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser (Opens in new window) as well as its oil. So in the Pacific where women perform much of the subsistence food production, rising input costs mean lower yields, more labour and growing food insecurity. The fuel shock and the food shock arrive together, and often in the same hands.

When kerosene prices rise or electricity is rationed, the adjustment falls onto women’s time – more hours securing fuel and water, fewer available for income generation, rest or education. The crisis compresses the working day from both ends.

The gender data on this particular crisis will not exist for a year, perhaps longer – but absence of data is not absence of evidence. We are already seeing it: market stalls emptying, tractor hours cut, and rest hours gone.

Experience from previous crises shows that such shocks do not stop at livelihoods and food security. When the Covid pandemic’s economic contraction hit Fiji in 2020, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose more than fivefold in two months (Opens in new window); similar surges were recorded across Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, attributed not to lockdowns alone but to economic strain inside households (Opens in new window).

The fuel shock and the food shock arrive together, and often in the same hands.

Economic stress does not create patriarchal violence, but it intensifies it where it already exists. This matters in a region where rates of intimate partner violence are among the highest recorded anywhere in the world (Opens in new window).

The risk is that the official response measures this crisis in fuel prices and energy reserves, missing the systems it is passing through. The informal economy, household food production and community safety are not peripheral to economic life – they are economic life, and they are disproportionately sustained by women. Community protection systems, women’s organisations and frontline livelihood support need resourcing now, not after coping mechanisms collapse.

There is also a longer-term answer, and the Pacific is already building it. The energy dependence that carries a Gulf conflict to a Honiara market stall is not a fact of nature – it is a policy choice. Replacing diesel generation with solar and storage would save the region (Opens in new window) hundreds of millions of dollars annually. For the women holding the Pacific’s informal economy together, it means more than lower bills: refrigeration that survives the next shock, markets that keep their lights on, and household budgets where fuel does not compete with food.

The fuel has already reached the wharf. As Pacific leaders prepare to gather in Palau this September for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, and in Fiji and Tuvalu for pre-COP discussions, the question is no longer whether this crisis will reach the region. It has. The question is whether the response will reach the women who will otherwise absorb it in their earnings, their time and their safety.

About the author

Alison Davidian

Alison Davidian is the UN Women Representative for the Fiji Multi-Country Office, supporting programs and policy engagement across 14 Pacific Island countries.

Topics

Gender & equality Pacific Islands Fiji Energy & resources