The lack of a regional vision for agriculture and forestry is “one of our biggest challenges”, says the Director of the Land Resources Division of the Pacific Community, Karen Mapusua.
But this is poised to change, after the Pacific Heads of Agriculture and Forestry Meeting in Fiji this month approved the development of the first-ever regional strategy for the sector.
“We really want to look far into the future at what it would look like for us to have an agricultural system that gives us a sustainable food basket for the region, and then work backwards from there,” Mapusua says, adding that a plan developed and owned by the region will also be a means of keeping partners accountable to supporting that vision.
“Obviously it has to be resilient to climate change, it has to support adaptation, it has to rebuild our biodiversity and our soils, it’s got to protect us from invasives. So there’s a lot of things that it needs to do, but we have to work out together what we want it to really look like.”
Engagement with farmers organisations to develop this plan will be critical, as will working through traditional systems and talking with communities at the very beginning of the design process, Mapusua says.
Research was one of the key issues of the meeting and associated side events, with Mapusua pointing to some valuable work being done to identify resilient and drought-resistant crops, and in the export/production realm, into cocoa genetics (particularly identifying ‘fine taste’ cocoa for value- adding). She would like to see more research into systems approaches: “Food systems is the buzzword at the moment. But we still are largely researching small pieces of that, we need to be looking at how the systems work together,” referring to all steps involved in getting a plant (or animal) to someone consuming it.
“At the moment, the global food system is having negative environmental outcomes. We’re living beyond our planetary boundaries, it’s having negative health outcomes, you look at our health stats around the region as an example of that. And, you know, food insecurity is growing globally. So we need to look at that whole system and how it works together, in order to change those outcomes,” Mapusua adds.
She believes COVID has shown us that the region has a high level of resilience.“ I think we’ve also learned just how interconnected we are with the rest of the globe. We often talk about our isolation, but that [COVID] just demonstrated how linked in we are.”
“There is a risk of going back to business as usual very quickly. And I think that other global events, like the war in Ukraine, is contributing to that. So you know, post-COVID, there was a really strong awareness of growing your food and sustainability and short value chains. And now, we’ve also got the pressures of that war that’s leading to fuel increases and fertiliser increases.”
She challenges the belief (mainly heard internationally) that “we’re not going to be able to produce enough food,” saying that it is “really doing a bit of damage to the narrative that we came out of COVID with around health and around sustainability and around resilience building. So there’s a real tension there between those two narratives. And our risk is falling into that fear trap of ‘we won’t be able to produce enough food’ and recognising that actually, we can, and we’ve proven that we can.”
