Pacific encouraged to invest more in agriculture

Transcript

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community is encouraging governments in the region to put more emphasis on developing their agricultural sectors.

The team leader of SPC's Pacific agriculture policy project, Vili Caniogo, says more than 80 percent of the region's population live in rural areas but this is not reflected in government policies.

To change this, the SPC and the EU this week launched the Pacific's second online library of government agriculture policies in Solomon Islands.

Mr Caniogo spoke with Koroi Hawkins about the initiative.

VILI CANIOGO: We have created these documents or these e-libraries or these policy banks mainly because we have found that accessing these documents has been difficult. For example cocoa or even coconuts or coffee in Solomon Islands case its often not quite accessible or made available. And what is the government's priorities for this sector and these key commodities and what if any documents are out there that talk about this sector. And so we have created this bank so that farmers, entreprenuers, policy makers themselves and even government line ministries can access these documents easily, read them and start engaging in discussions or planning or implementation of many of these commodities and industry development plans.

KOROI HAWKINS: And just turning to agriculture in the region, with climate change and with the need to protect food security in the region. How is the state of agriculture and what are the regions policies aiming towards or what should they be aiming towards?

VILI CANIOGO: Agriculture in the Pacific as of now is pretty much the same picture across the region and that is it is playing a rapidly declining role in terms of its contribution to economic growth at the macro level at least. But as we all know it is a sector that is important and touches all major, all the livelihoods in all the economies. Bearing in mind the Pacific remains very much rural based economies especially Melanesia. On the policies across the region most of them talk about the key commodities and the key plans and the key issues. And all of these issues are the same. They talk about food security the talk about institutional building they talk about nutrition etcetera etc. So we are finding they at least converge on quite a number of common issues. Going forward I think there is a few good opportunities for the agriculture sector to start thinking about but also to start making claims to their national governments about possible further investment in I guess new areas or exciting areas where they want to, where we want to build the sector. And some of these areas are in value processing, in organic farming and using technology as well some of the new areas we think that some of these policy prioties should be putting more focus on and these are some of the areas where development partners are looking at as well. And I should add to that list the role of the private sector in Agriculture.