Picture: Agriculture Technical Officer Nadi Mr. Vinay Sami (far left) demonstrates the portable rice mill to farmers of Votualevu with Minister for Agriculture Hon. Dr. Mahendra Reddy looking on.

The inherent strategic advantage of the local agriculture sector, particularly in strong performing commodities, needs to be exploited to ensure the sectors’ economic contribution maintained its recent positive performance.

This was recently shared by Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr. Mahendra Reddy to farmers of Votualevu, Nadi while handing over a portable rice mill to the Votualevu rice farmers cluster.

Minister Reddy shared that these past 3 years has seen the Ministry of Agriculture actively pursue the expansion of the sector through a number of key incentives to further the progression towards more commercial agricultural undertakings.

“We’ve been really pushing hard to expand agriculture, we understand and we are convinced that Fiji will continue to have agriculture as one of its strategic sectors, we’ve got tourism, other service sectors, manufacturing on a small scale but we will continue to promote and push for agricultural growth and expansion because Fiji has a strategic advantage in agriculture.

He shared that Fiji’s primary industries, particularly agriculture, both sugar and non-sugar would continue to play an important role in earning much needed foreign reserves, shedding light on the previously ill-conceived notion that non-sugar agriculture existed solely to cater to Fiji’s food security and only to some extent as a viable export earner.

“In this process, the non-sugar agriculture sectors’ export potential was kind of undervalued and not exposed. It was grossly undervalued, however, over the last 3 years, we have pushed for the export of non-sugar agriculture and in 2020, for the first time ever, we saw non-sugar agriculture exports exceeding sugar exports.

“In 2020, sugar exported $101million while non-sugar agricultural exports, both fresh and chilled, was $106million. The first time ever that we have surpassed the $100m mark in exports after feeding the entire nation,” said Hon. Reddy.

“This is a remarkable achievement. In non-sugar agriculture, the leading export crops are kava, dalo, ginger, turmeric and assorted vegetables, frozen and fresh and we are continuing to push for increased exports for this,” he added.

“I can tell you frankly that we cannot meet the demand for kava, and we are not able to fulfil the demand for ginger, turmeric, duruka and assorted vegetables, so there is huge potential for us to grow, produce and supply and export this agriculture produce,” said Minister Reddy.

Meanwhile, he has also called on Votualevu farmers to commit to growing rice for their self-consumption as well as for the market as the Ministry would also be on hand to provide the necessary assistance in terms of supply of planting materials and rice seeds to cater to their farming plan.

The Ministry is actively promoting the cultivation of rice at the national level, specifically that of the short-term 3-month rice varieties released by the Ministry’s Research Division, namely Bold Grain variety, Star variety,  and the aerobic Sitara and Cagivou rice varieties which are easy to grow and do not require full-time irrigation.

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