BUT ARE THEY BEING HEARD?
By Samantha Magick
Were you one of the many Pacific Islanders who spent the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic with soil under your nails? The introduction of lockdowns plus border closures precipitated an explosion of backyard gardening across the region last year, as people had more time on their hands and looked to feed their families and supplement incomes.
For a few weeks early in pandemic, vegetable seeds were almost impossible to come by in stores, and there were long lines for free seeds outside the Ministry of Agriculture office in Suva, Fiji. In Honiara, the Kastom Gaden Association’s Model Farm was busy. “We’ve received more than 900 visitors requesting for seeds, seedlings and information between October and November last year,” Pitakia Tikai of Kastom Gaden Association told Solomon Islands media. And the Guam Plant and Seed Share website, which has been quietly operating since 2011, saw a doubling of its membership when Guam went into lockdown.
Nishi Minoru of Tonga’s Nishi Trading said of these novice planters: “Some of them have never grown anything in their life but they’re all growing, and they’re excited about that. But the challenge with this is that when this all comes to maturity is finding the market for them, and I think this is where value adding opportunity for Tonga is to look at processing some of the stuff. The challenge there then is infrastructure. This is where I think development partners can come to the table.”
“I see a risk in that there is no real overarching policy for the whole country,” Nishi continues. “We need a 50 year roadmap.”
The pandemic also saw many people, suddenly jobless in urban or tourist centres, return to their village, something sugarcane farmer Ratu Livai Tora and chairman of Fiji’s Nature’s Way Cooperative told the Reset Fiji program, had caused disputes over land.
While people were planting at a domestic level, experienced larger scale farmers have urged governments, donors and national planners to reprioritise support for agriculture in recognition of its importance to food security, economic growth and physical health and well-being.
“Whilst the current COVID-19 situation remains dire, there are major opportunities within the agricultural sector to boost the Pacific economy,” the Pacific Islands Farmers Organisations Network (PIFON) said.
“Agriculture has all too often played second fiddle” wrote the authors of PIFON’s survey, COVID 19 & Agriculture: Pacific farmers have their say.
The report made a number of recommendations:
- Pacific Island Governments and authorities need to ensure their economies are geared to feed their own populations and provide local markets for farmers to sell goods for domestic consumption.
- Roll out “Eat Local, Grow Local, Buy Local” messaging.
- Investment in reorientating and developing new, more flexible and diversified value chains to better cope with future pandemic and other economic, environmental and climate shocks.
- Home gardeners need information on soil health, soil preparation, planting and integrated pest management, what crops are best to grow in small areas, traditional medicine plants and multi-grafted fruit and nut trees on dwarfed root stocks.
- Resources should be channelled into value-adding processors and agribusinesses, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to value add to and preserve surplus fresh produce arising from the closure of tourism outlets.
- Farmer’s organisations can partner with other stakeholders to produce training videos, webinars etc on backyard gardens, pest management, soil health, plant care, tips and tricks for gardening.
- More flexible fiscal and banking polices are needed to help the agricultural sector cater for food security and support rural livelihoods. Governments need to invest and focus more of their budgetary allocations to agriculture so countries can become self-sufficient and food secure.
- More investment is needed in equipment, technical staff, improved study and R&D options, and scholarships in the agricultural field for value adding technicians, food scientists, agronomists, plant scientists, soil technicians, veterinarians and agroforestry scientists.
- Young people need to be encouraged to look at agriculture as a viable livelihood.
It’s a long list, but farmers and agriculturalists say now is the time to make these long overdue investments in time, training and innovation.
The Scientific Research Organisation of Samoa (SROS) is one of the few national organisations focussed on agricultural science. Its plans include establishment of a commercial unit, food innovation centre, drug analysis on biological samples, and establishment of an agriculture research division and recent work has included research into medicinal plants and food science, with a view to combatting non communicable diseases (NCDs) .
In Fiji, the government conducted an agriculture census last February, with Agriculture Minister Dr Mahendra Reddy saying the information collected will allow it to “analyse and measure the impact of its intervention across time.” The census results are yet to be released but it is likely to find that the sugar industry, once Fiji’s biggest export earner, continues to leach farmers. “The sugarcane industry, to be frank, is a dying industry. We, my grandfather was a sugarcane farmer, my father was a sugarcane farmer- very successful, and when it was my turn, we realized it was not economical,” said Ratu Livai Tora on Reset Fiji. Sugar however, is a historically complex and politically sensitive industry which even in its decimated state, fuels economic activity in parts of Fiji’s western division, hence continued government efforts to prop it up.
Meanwhile one of Fiji’s most innovative agricultural producers is also its most problematic. The Grace Road group has employed technology and efficient farming methods to grow high quality produce, supply a large number of its own restaurants, and increasingly, produce value-added products like dumplings, cookies and flours, but its South Korean leader is in jail for assault, imprisonment, fraud, and other crimes committed in Fiji.
In PNG, Prime Minister James Marape has said he would like PNG to be known not just for its oil, gas and gold, but also as the “food basket of Asia.” A recent World Bank economic outlook report however states that PNG’s agricultural commodity experts declined by 9.2% year-on-year driven by “lower export values for cocoa, coffee and logs, and only partially offset by higher receipts for palm oil exports.”
And as with almost every aspect of life, climate change too continues to thwart progress in the sector, as evidenced by the damage wrought on crops and the impact on local produce prices this cyclone season.
The challenge then remains for the Pacific’s agriculture sector to move beyond subsistence while we have the opportunity. Farmers have had their say, but will they be heard?
