Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusive Excellence: Transdisciplinary and Global Perspectives

15: Feeding the City and Financing the Family: Women Market Traders in Suva, Fiji

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Feeding the City and Financing the Family Women Market Traders in Suva, Fiji SUSAN DEWEY AND CEMA BOLABOLA The Suva Municipal Market: An Introduction and Overview Markets, whether centrally organized or ad hoc in nature, provide a critical source of income generation for women throughout the Pacific Island region. This chapter—based on research in the Suva Municipal Market, one of the largest and oldest of all Pacific Island markets— provides an overview of challenges faced by female traders in the everyday course of their work and home lives. The authors argue that a number of forces, including gendered intrahousehold power dynamics and the low status of feminized labor, continue to marginalize women market traders and create an exploitative labor environment despite their significant contributions to Suva’s economy. An ample interdisciplinary body of literature demonstrates the absolute incorrectness of prevailing assumptions about women’s informal sector work as undesirable, poorly paid, and unskilled. Indeed, many women earn considerably more in the informal sector and may enjoy more flexibility in their use of time than they would in other forms of work available to them (Anderson, 2008). Government elites and international organizations frequently undervalue the contributions made by market traders to national economies, leading the authors of one study to characterize the production and marketing of fresh food in Papua New Guinea as “one of the country’s biggest success stories” (Bourke, 2005). Nonetheless, most women market traders throughout the Pacific Islands do not belong to formal 309 310 Susan Dewey and Cema Bolabola­ organizations that advocate for their rights. Using the case study of the Suva Municipal Market in Fiji, this chapter explores some of the factors that inhibit women market traders from labor organizing to advocate for their rights. Most definitions of formal and informal exchange stem from the state’s level of involvement in particular forms of economic activity (Dallago, 1990), yet a number of anthropological texts have clearly illustrated that these lines are rarely clear in everyday lived experience (Castells and Portes, 1989; Dilley, 1992; Graeber, 2001; Hart, 1973). Research demonstrates that much of the labor characterized as informal trade, because it is untaxed and operates without a central supervising authority, is actually highly organized and exists partly in response to a lack of state engagement with the working poor (Ayittey , 2006; King, 2001; MacGaffey & Bazenguissa-Ganga, 2000; Hansen , 2000; Obukhova & Guyer, 2002; Meagher, 2010; Stoller, 2002). Market trade is perhaps the classic form of informal sector activity in that it is often untaxed and operates with minimal government intervention; in Fiji’s municipal markets, traders pay a stall rental fee to the municipal authorities but are otherwise untaxed. Recent anthropological analyses that address meanings ascribed to particular food commodities or other consumable goods in the Pacific Islands have illuminated the complex ways in which these meanings become intertwined with local and national identities, sexuality, and conceptions of modernity (Besnier, 2011; Gewertz & Errington, 2010; Wardlow, 2006). Some research regarding the impact of cash earned from market trade on rural producers who previously practiced subsistence agriculture finds that the introduction of a cash economy dramatically alters the gendered division of labor and related sex roles, with greater prestige attached to cash generation (Benediktsson, 2002; Feinberg, 1986; Mosko, 1999), while others contend that cash-for-goods exchanges are simply incorporated into previously subsistence-based groups’ existing belief systems by utilizing multiple strategies to make sense of the use of cash (Curry, 2005; Sykes, 2007). One study of trade in Fiji has demonstrated that while increased involvement in the cash economy can benefit remote areas, it often comes at the expense of subsistence livelihoods that previously ensured a reliable food supply (Sofer, 2007). This is particularly relevant during a period in which the interim military government is embarking on a plan to reduce the amount spent on imported foods from just over U.S.$283 million to U.S.$59 million before 2012 (Vosamana, 2011). A burgeoning feminist anthropological literature on market trade first began to emerge in the 1980s, as part of broader discussions 311 Feeding the City and Financing the Family regarding the impact of development projects on women. These studies established the cross-cultural frequency with which market trade is a feminized activity (Alexander & Alexander, 2001; Babb, 1998; Boserup, 1970; Chalfin, 2004; Clark, 2010, 1994; House-Midamba & Ekechi, 1995; Kapchan, 1996; Milgram & Brown, 2009; Seligmann, 2004). This literature is complemented by a related body...