Approximately 600 livestock farmers are earmarked to receive fencing materials during this financial year, which is an unprecedented number as only an average of 100 farmers received fencing kit materials on an annual basis from the Ministry of Agriculture.

This was revealed by Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr. Mahendra Reddy to livestock farmers of Vanua Levu when distributing the fencing kit assistance to successful recipients under the Commercial Agriculture Development programme recently.

“So every year, we were providing about 100 or so farmers with fencing kits, this is the first year whereby the largest number of fencing kits will be provided to farmers around Fiji, over 500 farmers will be receiving fencing kits and if we do the same amount every year, then over the next ten years, every livestock farmer in the country will be provided with a basic set of fencing kits to expand their holdings.”

“The fencing materials will be delivered from this week and I want to thank you for your perseverance and patience some of you have got large livestock holdings, 100 goats or sheep or more than that but you still did not get any fencing materials because of some financial constraints in previous years so this year, at the Ministry we worked hard to get money from others sources,” said Minister Reddy.

He elaborated that the fencing kit assistance was made available through the Ministry’s own budgetary allocation, external donors and from other development partners.

“So here we are with a combination of three different sources of money, some from the GEF (German Environment Fund) Ridge To Reef (R2R) programme where we will be giving fencing kits along with forest tree species which we need to plant outside the fencing which is a requirement of the GEF fund where you can raise your animals in the fence and outside you can grow some native tree species.

“Then we have the Sheep extension programme and we also have the Commercial Agriculture Development Programme, together with the three programmes combined, this year we are giving fencing materials to close to 600 farmers, never have we assisted this number of farmers in previous years in one financial year where we gave out fencing materials to this many farmers. This is a remarkable achievement despite all the difficulties we had during this financial year,” Minister Reddy revealed.

“We are very excited about the impact this development will have on the expansion of livestock, particularly livestock holdings on sheep or goat, because we are importing 99% of lamb meat that we consume from outside, so there is a huge room to raise production. I am not saying that we can become 100% self-sufficient in one or two years, but what we want to see is progressive realization of some degree of self-sufficiency on provision of lamb meat from within. 

"Also about 40% of goat meat is imported so we need to increase goat meat not only to substitute imported goat meat but to also substitute lamb meat," he added.

Meanwhile 134 fencing kits were distributed during this first phase to livestock farmers in Vanua Levu.

 -Ends-

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