The first Pacific Week of Agriculture starts today in Vanuatu bringing together farmers, scientists and policy makers from across the region.
Vanuatu cattle Photo: Vanuatu Agriculture Dept
Organised by the Pacific Community, other NGOs like the Pacific Island Farmers Organisation Network, or PIFON, are helping out by running workshops.
PIFON's manager Kyle Stice said empowering women farmers would be the focus of one of today's seminars.
"So this is about how can we improve access to resources: technology, financial resources to help our women farmer organisations improve their service delivery to the members. It's directly in line with one of PIFON's new programmes which is targeting specifically Pacific Women in Agriculture."
Kyle Stice said PIFON will also be running a workshop to help farmers adapt to climate change.
Mr Stice said farmers organisations attending the week plan to send a daily communique to policy makers.
He said he wants policy makers to hear the farmers' voices.
"At the end of each day we are hoping to produce a short farmers' communique which will be fed back to the policy makers who will be meeting on the Thursday and the Friday and this is just to share what some of the key constraints are and more importantly what he farmers feel are some of the soluitions."
