Picture: Handing over of the Commercial Agriculture Development programmes at the Commissioner Northern's Office.

Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr. Mahendra Reddy handed over offer letters to 11 successful recipients of the Ministry of Agriculture's commercial development programmes yesterday.  

While officiating at the handing over ceremony at the Commissioner Northern's Office in Macuata House, Labasa, Minister Reddy said the expansion of commercial agriculture in the country had proceeded exceptionally well over these past three years despite numerous binding constraints.

"Today we are here to launch the three facilities out of our commercial agriculture development programmes.

The three programmes are the Women in Agriculture (2 recipients), Land Clearing Development (7 recipients) and Orchard Development (2 recipients) programme.

With respect to the Orchard Development Programme, Minister Reddy expressly stated in absolute terms, that there were no issues with Fiji's food security as there was an abundance of food in the country, however, increasing nutrition security was the focus under the Orchard Development programme to address the lack of a balanced diet in Fijian households. 

"We want to deal with this in two ways, one, our programme will ensure that people have access to seedlings and fruit trees in the urban areas and secondly, is to increase supply to an extent where the price of fruits goes down and therefore is affordable and accessible to all households in Fiji. 

"To do that we want to establish dedicated fruit tree orchards, at the moment, the breadfruit and mango you get, it's all wildly grown. Rarely you'll see a breadfruit orchard, a mango orchard, a dragonfruit orchard, or guava orchard, you'll see those in minimal numbers because we started developing those last year," said Minister Reddy.

He also elaborated on the intent behind the Land Clearing programme, which was to expand commercial agriculture and to bring in productive, unutilized virgin land under agriculture. 

"This programme was very popular, there are land owning groups, individual farmers and settlements that have land but lack the resources to clear and prepare that land and have planting material. 

"The recipients of the Land Clearing facility will receive assistance through the provision of bulldozers, that will come and clear the identified land, we'll come with the excavator and clear the drainage and we'll come with the tractor to prepare the land and also provide the planting material," Hon. Reddy. 

He added that these steps taken by the Ministry would expand agriculture, a little at a time, in the nations' interest. 

Minister Reddy has also called for more participation from women farmers to take the leadership role in agricultural entrepreneurship, especially via the Women in Agriculture programme. 

He acknowledged the efforts of the successful recipients of the programmes as they had each earned their place through merit and their agricultural dedication.

He also highlighted that the priority of the Ministry remained on ensuring the nation's food and nutritional security, especially in light of the global pandemic.  

"It was encouraging to note how people mobilized themselves to utilize their time and secure their households food security and at the same time, we were able to get farmers at the farm level to increase production so that we could deal with arbitrary increases in prices," he said. 

Minister Reddy also highlighted some of the ongoing programmes of the Ministry such as the Farms Support Package, the Home Gardening programme and the subsidized land preparation programme, which was still being fully utilised by Fijian households. 

-Ends-

• ← Go to all Press Releases