The Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘We Rice Up’ programme is reaping rewards following a bumper harvest this year, particularly with farmers from the Northern Division setting the precedent.

While meeting with rice farmers throughout the country and distributing portable rice mills and rice harvesters recently, Minister for Agriculture, Waterways and Environment Hon. Dr Mahendra Reddy highlighted positive reports that indicated a surge in rice production this year.

“We have seen a major surge in rice production this year in Vanua Levu as well as in Viti Levu, Viti Levu is also now coming up strongly and we are very impressed with the volume of rice produced from the non-rice growing areas in Vanua Levu such as Seaqaqa, Tabia, Naqere, and in Wailevu, Papalagi, Natabe, Daku, Lagalaga, Kelikoso, Taganikula, these are now major rice-growing areas.

“We’re waiting for the updated numbers but indications show that rice in Vanua Levu, the total volume of production towards Seaqaqa may be much more than traditional rice-growing areas like in Matasawalevu, Dreketi, Malawai, Korokadi in Bua and these are positive signs moving forward,” said Minister Reddy.

He said that it was now abundantly clear that rice farming as a business was viable for farmers, stressing again that there was no room for part-time farming anymore, and making another call for farmers to take up farming as a business and to target growing three rice crop cultivation cycles in a year instead of the conventional two crops per year schedule to boost rice production rates even further.

“The variety of rice that we are promoting now is the short-term rain-fed variety, we are moving away from the traditional heavy input requirement varieties to the short-term 90-120 day varieties such as Star, Bold Grain, Sitara and Cagivou, these are the only varieties at the moment that we are promoting,” said Hon. Reddy.

“Other than that, the Ministry is not responsible for the traditional variety that farmers are growing. So I want to again thank all farmers for pushing agriculture growth and development at the national level and it is an investment that you have made to deliver our national objective for securing food for households in Fiji.”

“So we’re very excited and heartened to see the response and as you know, we’re going big time into mechanization, and if this trend continues we should be able to get to 80 percent self-sufficiency in probably another 5 years’ time and that’s our target,” he said.

Meanwhile, portable rice mills were distributed to rice farmers' clusters in Nadroumai and Lomawai, in Nadroga and Korolailai in Daku, Lomavatu in Wainikoro and Salusalu on the outskirts of Labasa recently to ease the travel burden of the farmers who often went far distances to mill their rice paddy for their consumption.

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