Kiribati's Considerable Kava Consumption
Michael Louze, former chairman of the Vanuatu Kava Industry said when you break it down, it's about four kilograms of kava per person annually if half the population drinks.Kiribati was the world's largest consumer of Vanuatu kava in 2024.
The Vanuatu Daily Post reported that last year the country imported 280 metric tonnes of kava from Vanuatu.
Michael Louze, former chairman of the Vanuatu Kava Industry and a kava exporter to the United States, said when you break it down, it's about four kilograms of kava per person annually if half the population drinks.
'Some drink more, some less. But even at that level, it's a solid figure for a country this size.'
In 2023, China was the world's largest importer of raw kava, but 99 per cent of it went towards extract production for re-export.
'China was never a market for kava,' Louze said.
'It made more sense for the bulk product to go through China. But in Kiribati, it's different. They're drinking it – no processing, no re-export. Pure consumption.'
But one Kiribati kava bar owner, Kantaake Robapi, said there's too many of them now.
'Each village has a kava bar. There are too many kava bars in Kiribati.
'You pay AUD$150 [approximately US$97] for a licence. The Ministry of Health checks the premises – the toilets, tools for cleaning kava. Once they approve, you pay your fee to the Tarawa council.'
Kiribati's Minister for Women, Youth and Sports, Ruth Cross Kwansing, has raised concerns about kava's effects on society.
Kwansing told the ABC the impact of high kava consumption is being felt at homes.
'If fathers aren't home with their children and their wives, then obviously they're not looking after their families and their children,' she said.
'If they're spending all the money on kava, then where's the funds that the family needs for food and basic essentials?'
She said men were exhausted from late-night kava drinking and not able to cut toddy or go out fishing and were not productive at home.
Meanwhile, Tonga is calling on fellow Pacific kava producers to follow its lead in restricting the export of kava for extraction – a move that has sparked strong pushback from Vanuatu and Fiji, the region's two largest kava exporters.
Tonga's positioncomes from concerns over cultural erosion and potential misuse, and promotes the idea that kava should only be consumed in its traditional, drinkable form – not processed into extracts for capsules, powders, or supplements abroad.
There's also worries about a shortage in Vanuatu.
Louze linked the shortage to several causes: the increasing number of kava farmers joining seasonal work programmes in Australia and New Zealand, damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Harold on Pentecost in 2020, and growing demand in the Port Vila market.
A kava plant takes more than five years to mature before it can be harvested.
'People in Port Vila are consuming tons of kava every week, but they are not planting it,' he said.
'The population is growing rapidly, and more young men and women are drinking kava daily.'
But he also said farmers cannot go wrong with planting kava with demand both locally and internationally growing, and prices have never been so high.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scoop
19 hours ago
- Scoop
Deel Surpasses US$1 Billion Run Rate, Signaling A New Era In Global HR
Press Release – Deel Deel is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world 4th June 2025 – Leading payroll and HR company Deel announced today that it surpassed a US$1 billion run rate in Q1 2025 — a significant milestone achieved in just six years since its founding. This accomplishment underscores Deel's rapid growth, global scale, and unwavering commitment to enabling the global future of work. Financial snapshot: Deel crossed $1 billion run rate in Q1 2025 and has continued to grow in April & May It has achieved 75% year on year revenue growth, April 2024-2025. Deel has been profitable since Q3 2023 and has not raised money since 2022. In Q1 2025 it achieved double digit EBITDA margin growth. It has achieved 164% year on year growth across its HR and payroll products, April 2024-2025. With a customer base exceeding 35,000 companies and 1.25m workers across 150+ countries — including industry leaders like Klarna, BCG, and — Deel has emerged as a foundational platform for modern workforce management. The company's integrated product suite and owned infrastructure has reshaped how organisations hire, pay, and manage employees. It offers a unified product platform – eliminating the traditional patchwork of providers many companies used previously – as well as white label and unbundled services, driving long-term growth diversification. 'When I first met Deel, there were 10 people with a big idea, and now they're powering global teams at a massive scale,' said Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Board Member at Deel. 'Alex and Shuo continue to execute on their vision, methodically building a platform that reduces the complexity of global hiring and enables companies to onboard talent anywhere in the world with speed and confidence. As a result, Deel has become the default infrastructure for global work. Their product velocity and early bet on AI have unlocked tools that make global work simpler and more accessible for customers everywhere.' 'Reaching a $1 billion run rate is a reflection of the trust our customers have put in us,' said Alex Bouaziz, Co-founder and CEO of Deel. 'From day one, we believed the future of work demanded a new kind of infrastructure — one that was global, flexible, and obsessed with quality. We're proud of this milestone, but we're even more excited about what's next. Our work has only just begun.' About Deel Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, IT asset equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.
Scoop
21 hours ago
- Scoop
Deel Surpasses US$1 Billion Run Rate, Signaling A New Era In Global HR
4th June 2025 – Leading payroll and HR company Deel announced today that it surpassed a US$1 billion run rate in Q1 2025 — a significant milestone achieved in just six years since its founding. This accomplishment underscores Deel's rapid growth, global scale, and unwavering commitment to enabling the global future of work. Financial snapshot: Deel crossed $1 billion run rate in Q1 2025 and has continued to grow in April & May It has achieved 75% year on year revenue growth, April 2024-2025. Deel has been profitable since Q3 2023 and has not raised money since 2022. In Q1 2025 it achieved double digit EBITDA margin growth. It has achieved 164% year on year growth across its HR and payroll products, April 2024-2025. With a customer base exceeding 35,000 companies and 1.25m workers across 150+ countries — including industry leaders like Klarna, BCG, and — Deel has emerged as a foundational platform for modern workforce management. The company's integrated product suite and owned infrastructure has reshaped how organisations hire, pay, and manage employees. It offers a unified product platform - eliminating the traditional patchwork of providers many companies used previously - as well as white label and unbundled services, driving long-term growth diversification. 'When I first met Deel, there were 10 people with a big idea, and now they're powering global teams at a massive scale,' said Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Board Member at Deel. 'Alex and Shuo continue to execute on their vision, methodically building a platform that reduces the complexity of global hiring and enables companies to onboard talent anywhere in the world with speed and confidence. As a result, Deel has become the default infrastructure for global work. Their product velocity and early bet on AI have unlocked tools that make global work simpler and more accessible for customers everywhere.' 'Reaching a $1 billion run rate is a reflection of the trust our customers have put in us,' said Alex Bouaziz, Co-founder and CEO of Deel. 'From day one, we believed the future of work demanded a new kind of infrastructure — one that was global, flexible, and obsessed with quality. We're proud of this milestone, but we're even more excited about what's next. Our work has only just begun.' About Deel Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, IT asset equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.
RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
Advocacy group calls for removal of funeral directors as cremation middleman
Photo: 123rf An advocacy group wants to see funeral directors removed as the middleman in cremations, saying it's costing people money. Death Without Debt spokesperson Fergus Wheeler explained two doctors were required to sign off on a death for cremation - the first would have seen the body and made notes about the cause of death, and a second doctor was required sign-off on that paperwork. Currently, the system was set up so that people needed a funeral director to facilitate this second sign-off, with funeral directors billing the family for doing so - but legally, it did not have to be done this way. Wheeler said a small tweak to the Ministry of Health's existing online death documents system could fix this, ideally allowing the first doctor's paperwork to be uploaded to the cloud to be checked by the second doctor, without the need for the funeral director to forward it on. He said the cloud already existed, it just required a change of process. "You can if you understand the medical referee system, sometimes, if you're lucky, get through the system," Wheeler said. "But 99.9 percent of the public have no idea how the system works." As well as giving funeral directors permission to charge a service fee for this administration task, it also gave them the opportunity to "hook people into a package deal", charging grieving families for things they did not need. The Funeral Directors Association strongly denied this allegation to the select committee. With cremations now making up 80 percent of deaths - in part because the cost was still a lot less than a burial - Wheeler said this affected a lot of people. "We don't blame the funeral industry particularly for this," Wheeler said. "It's actually the Ministry of Health [who have] known that the system has been dysfunctional for decades." The Health Select Committee's final report into funeral debt was released last week. In it, it agreed that "the current process and regulations impose high costs on the public and create a barrier for people who want to organise their own funerals, particularly when their loved ones are about to be cremated". It encouraged the ministry to prioritise further work on updating the cremation regulations, and requested a report on the planned changes to regulations before the end of this parliamentary term. "We also encourage the ministry to consider making all documents relating to cremation available on the Death Documents website. We note that the Ministry's planned work could address the current barriers to DIY funerals." But Wheeler said those directives to the ministry were weak and lacked urgency. "You've got a pretty major social problem with funeral debt happening, and the Health Select Committee have said, well, let's fix it sometime in the next few years. It's not quick enough, it's not urgent enough," he said. The Funeral Directors Association, which represents about 75 percent of funeral homes, was approached for comment by the select committee, and its comments were included in the final report. According to the report, it "strongly refuted what it described as Death Without Debt's 'allegations of predatory behaviour' on the part of funeral homes, and said that, on the contrary, the industry has a 'caring, respectful, and professional approach'." "It maintained that, without public funding of funeral services, private funeral companies must fill the void. In so doing, these companies incur property, insurance, compliance, staffing, and other costs, which must be covered by the prices they charge." It suggested the government introduce a legislative mandate for funeral prices to be transparent - it required price transparency from its members and said it encouraged them to offer free consultations for those pre-planning and pre-paying for funerals. Comments from the Ministry of Health were also included in the report. It acknowledged the current burial and cremation processes were "outdated and disproportionate, and needed modernisation". It said previous work in this area had been delayed by Covid-19, but it was in discussions with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Department of Internal Affairs about modernising the regulation of the funeral sector. "The ministry told us it is committed to reviewing the cremation regulations in 2025," the report said. The Funeral Directors Association, the Ministry of Health and the select committee have been approached for further comment. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
