The boatman at a surf camp in Fiji (not Tavaura, incidently) makes 40 Fijian dollars a week. That's about $20 US. To earn that, he gets up at 5am and brings the boat round to the camp, as the surfers are getting their coffee and breakfast. The surfers are amped, they want to get to the break, so he helps them load their boards and gear. They often have two boards each - if it's their first or second day, they sometimes bring three. Each board costs maybe $400 US. So he's helping to load between five and ten months pay per surfer into the boat. That's not counting shorts ($50 - two weeks pay), rashguard ($30 - a week and a half), booties ($40 - two weeks), leash ($15 - a few days).

He's 45 years old. He has six kids. He has persistent headaches, but can't afford a doctor. After a couple of days in the camp, the more interested surfers find this out and give him ibuprofin or whatever painkillers they have. That's how he gets by.

He drives the boat to the break, the surfers drop out, jazzed and hooting, and he goes to sleep. As the surfers come back to the boat, he hands them fresh orange juice, sandwiches, cookies. After six or seven hours in the sun, he drives them back to the camp. They settle down to showers, cold beer, ping-pong, a big barbeque dinner. He goes back to the village after dark. They stay a week or two and go back home. He does this every day, every year.

OK, so what? Lots of people have hard lives. Big deal. Two billion people on this planet live on less than $2 a day. He earns (lucky him!) almost fifty percent more than that! His life expectancy is about 65, his kids will probably live after they are born (infant mortality in Fiji is about 25 in a thousand). He's doing great compared to East Africa, where kids have a about a one in ten chance of dying in their first year, or Zimbabwe, life expectancy is dropping towards 35. He's doing fine! Not as good as us, of course - we'll live into our 70s, our kids will almost certainly survive, we earn maybe twenty to over a hundred times what he does.

What would happen if the boatmen, and his village, who actually own the reef - it's theirs, they can do with it what they want - if they said - "if you want to surf this reef, each of you pays us $100 a day" (or $50 or $20)? The village, not the camp operator, gets the money. All of the money, not a little cut as they do now. Would that be fair? I think so, probably.

We could say we're not going to surf there. A boycot! But it's a clean, seriously world-class break in warm water. That's a scarce resource and getting scarcer as every person on the planet within five hours drive of water becomes some kind of surfer. Supply and demand. He only needs a half-dozen people a day at $100 each to make his village pretty wealthy.

Now this, would, of course, make access to the break exclusive - no pay, no play. This gets some surfers pretty upset. Or, at least, they get upset at Tavarua, which was the first place to do it.

Is it because it's too expensive? If it was exclusive, but a lot cheapr - say $20 a day - and the lucky surfers were selected by random poll - would that be better? If it was exclusive, but you had to pay Fijians $200 a day instead of Americans, would that be better (it sure would be for Australian surfers, who often regard Tavarua as a kind of evil American Surfing Starbucks)? Or is it that surfing is just such a spiritual, one-with-the-earth kind of thing that it should always be free? (Incidently when we think about how low-impact our sport is, we should probably consider how much crap our cars have chucked into the air in the last year on the way to our dawn patrols - if you want low impact, get a bicycle).

Surfing is lovely, spiritual and makes you feel closer the the universe - it's a good thing. In an ideal world, we could surf anywhere, any time, for free.

But the fact is, most of the reefs and beaches we use are owned by somebody. And usually, if it's warm water (South Pacific, Indo, Central America) those people really need the money that we spend on wax and sunscreen - they need it for food, medicine, decent housing and clean water. So if the best way for them to get a little more is to charge more and make access exclusive, then go for it I say.

If you're reading this, you're doing a lot better than the boatman. And by the time we''ve had a couple of days of tropical barrels, we owe him, and his reef, and his village. We owe him more than $20 a week.

Data

Fijian life expectancy and infant mortality: here
African infant mortality: here
Zimbabwe life expectancy: here
US income & wealth distribution (a whole other tub of monkeys): here
Life expectancy in the US: here

Comments welcomed at: jdj@pacificwaverider.com