Abstract
Coconuts were the basis of Tonga’s economy before and after the Second World War. After that war, Queen Sālote’s eldest son, Prince Tungī, sought to speed modernization partly by investing in processing coconuts and copra in Tonga and overseas. Tonga’s Copra Board was pivotal to this. Although it found markets after the British Ministry of Food (MOF) contracts ended, the Board permitted a proportion of its copra price stabilization fund to be expended on diverse investments, unlike other comparable territories. From the early 1960s, it supported Prince Tungī’s plans to extend coconut processing. British CDW grants from 1965 financed wider modernization, including coconut replanting. By then, as King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV, Tungī’s plan to gain entry to the US market via a copra processing plant in American Samoa, along with other enterprises, came under increasing accounting scrutiny. The King too long ignored this and failed, with significant losses for the Board and Tongans.