Noni fruit growing at the Vaiea noni farm

In mid-2011 a group of Chinese businesspeople from New Zealand made arrangements to take large quantities of noni juice from Niue, the Cook Islands and Samoa.

The Vaiea farm, a joint venture between the Reef Group and the Government of Niue, was officially opened in October 2004. Its processing plant – described by the business owners as the most technologically advanced in the Southern Pacific – is capable of producing 100,000 litres of juice a month. Fruit from the farm is supplemented by fruit gathered from Niue’s native forests.

Noni (Morinda citrifolia) is an evergreen bush grown mainly in the islands of the South Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia. Its white fragrant flowers bloom out of cluster-like pods, which bear the noni fruit. The fruit, which resembles a small bread fruit, is fleshy and gel-like when ripe.

The juice is extracted when the fruit is almost ripe. It taste and smell are not pleasant but its health promoting properties have been recognised as a natural remedy in Polynesia for thousands of years. Its main attribute is its proven ability to boost the body’s immune system.

The main active ingredient in noni is proxeronine, which is converted by the body in to xeronine. Xeronine is a critical biochemical compound involved in a wide range of normal biochemical reactions of the human body.

The farm began an expansion programme in 2011, with the aim of doubling its size from 60 ha to 120 ha.

For more information about noni juice and how to buy it, click here.

Sources:  Radio NZ International and Pure Pacifika

Internet Niue’s Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui at the ICANN conference in Beijing

RockET director Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui says it’s important that the global internet community is constantly reminded of the internet access issues faced by small Pacific Islands.

“Satellite connections such as the one Internet Niue funds for Niue are hugely expensive. Limited bandwidth is a frustration for users. Also latency – the time it takes for a signal to travel from ground station to ground station via the satellite – hinders Niueans from using some applications,” he says.

“There are potential solutions out there, but we have to keep awareness of our access issues alive, or they will drop off the international radar.”

ICANN is the international body that governs the internet. Fakaotimanava-Lui attended its conference in Beijing earlier this month as a delegate representing Internet Niue as a member of ICANN’s Asia-Pacific group, APRALO.

“I focused mainly on the APRALO meeting.  ICANN is a strange organisation that it has so many acronyms and different type of committees, councils, groups, organisations and levels all under one umbrella!  Imagine the internet and its interconnectivity, that’s how all of the arms, legs and limbs of ICANN would be like!”

He says he spoke at several sessions: “Mostly it’s to do with telling everyone who we are but also to explain the technical issues we face. These issues apply to the Pacific Islands, but not to Australia and New Zealand, which are usually lumped together with us as part of a wider Pacific region, which in turn is often lumped together with Asia.”

For the future, Fakaotimanava-Lui sees the need for a Pacific Island sub-group within ICANN so that island nations can have a louder and more cohesive voice in international forums.

The chapter, which represents the interests of Oceania-Pacific internet users, seeks to provide impartial and relevant advice to Pacific Island governments and internet users.

PICISOC has been at the forefront of a number of important initiatives in the region, including geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS); the move to IPv6; cybersecurity; working in collaboration with the Pacific Network Operators Group and other related groups; access for people with disabilities; internet governance; and improving the availability of free and open software).

PICISOC’s annual conference, PacINET, brings together many internet practitioners from around the region. Representatives from Internet Niue are regular attendees at the conference and have been strong supporters of PICISOC activities over the years.

Emani says most Pacific Islands face similar challenges in providing internet services that meet the expectations of 21st century users.

“So it’s important that we share experiences and knowledge, and work together to provide our users with the best possible internet technology and service. PICISOC is the best forum for doing that.”

Emani has birds for company while working on top of Internet Niue's Lakepa tower

Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui of RockET Systems, Internet Niue’s service provider, says the transmitter has been tested for more than a month with good results. Internet users in Lakepa, Mutulau and Liku will be enjoying the benefits.

“It will eventually be one of our main wifi sites. Because of its greater height, there is less interference from the rapidly growing vegetation in the area.”

The 40-metre tower, which was funded by The IUSN Foundation, is one of the tallest structures on the island. The tallest is the 85-metre Niue Broadcasting Corporation tower at Sekena.

The national butterfly, the Niue blue (underside)

The discovery of Nacaduba niueensis surprised the scientific community as the flora and fauna of the Pacific Islands has been well researched by numerous scientists over many decades. But it does mean that Niue now has a national butterfly.

Lachlan caught a single male, small, blue butterfly from a flowering tree on his 2009 visit. Unsure of what it was, he discovered on his return to Australia that it was an undescribed species, similar to a single female butterfly had been collected 30 years earlier.

Because there are only a handful of plant and animal species unique to Niue, this butterfly has particular importance to the people of the island. But only two specimens in 30 years suggests that the species might be very rare.

Lachlan, who has discovered many new species of butterflies and hawk moths over the years and published numerous scientific papers, is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of London in 1984 and a Research Associate of the Australian Museum’s Entomology Department.

The national butterfly, the Niue blue (upperside)

He hopes to return to Niue one day to see if he can find the Niue blue elsewhere on the island. In the meantime, the only two examples of the species are being cared for by the Australian Museum on behalf of the people of Niue. The male was captured by Rob Lachlan and the female comes from the collections in the Bishop Museum, Hawaii.

Source:  Science Bytes Blog, Australian Museum

Mr Jessop, the art teacher at Niue High School, was one of a small group of artists who led the revival of interest in the distinctive Niuean designs traditionally used to decorate hiapo (tapa cloth). The Internet Niue logo is a modern interpretation of this art form.

Fortysix year-old Mr Jessop died from haemorrhagic dengue fever, a rare complication of dengue infection, and is survived by his wife Sema and baby Arizona. Most people infected with dengue suffer only mild symptoms such as fevers, but for an unfortunate few infection can be extremely painful or even fatal.

Niue residents have suffered from a series of dengue infections in the past 12 months. Dengue is caused by up to four virus infections spread by bites from infected mosquitoes.  The Niue Government has a major mosquito control operation underway and residents and visitors are urged to use insect repellent and to minimise skin exposure.

Many relatives of Mr Jessop returned to Niue from Auckland to attend the funeral held earlier this week in his home village of Mutalau, attended by most of the population of the island.

Niue vanilla beans, photo copyright Dreamkeeper

Niue Vanilla International sells its certified organic vanilla to Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and is working on a deal with Japan. Owner Stanley Kalauni says the business is flourishing but needs more suppliers.

“Former growers who took part in a previous government scheme which crashed and burned, are reluctant to start farming the crop again. Once their beans were in full production no-one was buying.”

Stanley Kalauni says his company pays suppliers for beans before processing them, so the farmers know they’re always going to get their money.

Source: Radio New Zealand International

Emani Fakaotimanava-Lui, who attended the forum in Geneva, Switzerland, as a  representative of the Pacific Islands Internet Society Chapter (PICISOC), spoke about the high costs, limited bandwidth and latency issues associated with satellite connections.

Latency is the time it takes for an electronic signal, such as an email message, to travel to its destination. With the geostationary satellites used by Internet Niue and many other Pacific island ISPs, it takes at least a quarter of a second for the signal to travel 35,000 km to the satellite and back to the ground. In practice, satellite latency can be as much as two seconds.

This creates big problems for applications requiring real-time user input, such as remote surgery and online games. It frustrates videoconferencing and voice-over-internet calling and makes it difficult to use applications like Skype.

Emani said he has high hopes for the O3B initiative that internet founder Vint Cerf highlighted in Geneva as a potential answer to the Pacific’s satellite woes. OB3 is a new satellite-based broadband service that the promoters expect to launch in late 2013.

“‘O3B’ stands for “[The] Other 3 Billion”, and refers to people living in places where broadband internet is unlikely to become available in the foreseeable future. It is financially backed by heavy hitters including SES World Skies, Google, the HSBC Bank and the Development Bank of Southern Africa.”

He says the plan is to launch a constellation of eight satellites that will orbit much closer to the earth than regular communications satellites. This will potentially provide remote places like Niue with internet and telco links operating at speeds similar to fibre. Latency will hopefully be a thing of the past.

Internet service providers in the Cook Islands, Pakistan and Nigeria have signed up to the O3B constellation and Per Darnell, president of The IUSN Foundation that funds Internet Niue, says the foundation is now investigating whether it is a workable option for Niue.

Cultural issues such as localised content and support for multiple languages and scripts  featured at Global INET 2012. There are several initiatives underway around the globe for bringing local languages into the IT age, including a crowd-sourcing project for developing internet and computer terminology for Arabic. Emani says he hopes to do the same for Vagahau Niue.

He also says it is important that Pacific nations have a clear voice in international forums like INET.

“We can learn a lot from other countries and cultures by sharing ideas and experiences. While the Pacific Islands are pretty much unique, other countries may be able to offer us potential solutions if they know about the challenges we face. This means that Pacific stories and people need to be presented in forums like this.”

Emani’s attendance at Global INET 2012 was funded by the Internet Society.

In November last year the Niue Ministry of Education announced that the island was pulling out of the scheme because the ongoing costs of maintaining the laptops and the satellite link were too great a burden. Four years ago, Niue was the first country in the world where every child of school age was provided with a laptop.

OLPC regional director Michael Hutak says Niue is now back on board.

In November, when Lisimoni Togahai the acting director of education said the scheme was to be phased out, she said the programme had gone very well, with children’s computer literacy and understanding of issues such as climate change improving. Her only concerns were budgetary.