Fiji sugar farmers urged to grit their teeth after Winston

Transcript

Fiji sugar industry chief Abdul Khan has urged sugar farmers to grit their teeth after a devastating few weeks for the industry.

Sugar cane growers have told RNZ International they are fed up after Cyclone Winston's damage to crops followed by last week's flooding.

Mr Khan says the crop is 40 percent down after Winston and assessments are still being done after the floods.

He told Sally Round farmers need to bear with it because help is on its way.

ABDUL KHAN:  If we get the assistance that people have talked about, especially European Union where they've clearly come out publicly and said that they will help the agricultural sector and the sugar cane sector, we should see a setback for about a year.  But that, what we normally are looking at doing is starting planting in our normal period which is from September to about November this year.  If we can get our crop planted over that period then come 2017 we should be back, if not better, than where we had been pre-Winston because we had two seasons of quite drought conditions.  With that in mind, I think the setback is definitely here, we just got to grit our teeth and just bear it for 2016 but come 2017 we do see a good year going forward.

SALLY ROUND:  The growers that I have been speaking to, some of them said they have had enough, they can't deal with it anymore.  One of the farmers said 70 percent are going to walk away from sugar.

AK:  I don't agree with that.  For example, having 40 percent down on crop for Viti Levu, means that the crop is still there.  In other words, it is just a matter of resurrecting that and moving forward.  There will be some people who will be frustrated and it's understandable.  And some people, not so much the sugar cane that they have lost but everything else that they have lost, so they will move out and they may have been sugar cane farmers but they will move out because obviously they have lost everything and they want to do something different and that's fine.  It's a choice that they make but at the end of the day I don't see too many people moving out.  It also depends on what assistance can be provided at the end of the day and if we can get the right assistance which has been promised to us, I think we will back up there.

SR:  They've talked about that assistance and said they wanted it urgently and it wasn't coming to them.  What is in the pipeline for them?

AK:  Basically if we look at how we had set it up, there was basically three stages to it.  The first stage was to get them ration bags etcetera and get them safe around their local areas and people that had lost their homes etcetera to get them into temporary homes as quickly as possible.  That was the first approach that we took.  The second approach was then we allowed them to draw up to a thousand dollars interest free and they don't have to worry about paying any of that back until after 2017 when we have got the crop back up and then we will actually stage that back up.  That is money coming from the Sugar Cane Growers Fund.  The third one, is the big one, which we are working with the European Union.  They have released some of the money already but they are the people that we are looking at releasing most of the money and what we will do with that money is the replanting that we need to put in place to get our crop up as quickly as possible for 2017.  Government has also given us 5 million dollars.  We are sourcing that to get plantation done quickly.  More for a seed cane purpose rather than for a mature cane because of the two drought years we have had we do not have the amount of seed cane that we need to         get our crop back up so if we get that planting done now then that planting will act as our seed cane for the main planting from September onwards.  We need to be careful that we plant at the appropriate time as well because it's all very well for farmers to say that I need the assistance now but if they go out and plant now we may not get the crop that we are looking for in 2017.

SR:  So they need to just bear with it, is that what you are saying?

AK:  Yeah and most of the farmers we are talking to we are saying bear with us, we are all in this together, let's just try and find the best way going forward.  We all know 2016 is going to be a bad one and it's something that we just got to work through and hopefully come 2017 we will be in a better position.  And it's no different to us for example in terms of our mill.  Rarawai mill, we are waiting for insurance assessors, they are arriving, they have been here for last three weeks, other assessors are arriving tomorrow, but we still got to get the mills prepared ready for whatever cane we do have out there, to have that process come end of July this year.