Transcript
Inia Seruiratu says the deficit has grown from an annual US$207 million to US$280 million since 2011. He says the problem has been farmers in Fiji not being able to produce consistently throughout the year.
"Those people need food everyday and we need to be consistent in our supply levels as well. Volume is another big issue as well, for us to meet the expectations we need to produce the volumes as well. And quality, we need to produce good quality products because we are competing with other market exporters and suppliers as well."
Mr Seruiratu says the increased demand for goods in Fiji justifies the growing number of imports, but he says there's huge potential to send produce in the other direction.
"The current government is seriously creating the environment now and we have seen the growth but that growth is still insufficient. And we need to do more."
Fiji's High Commissioner to New Zealand, Filimone Waqabaca says trade is Fiji's achilles heel. He says even though 60 percent of New Zealand's rootcrop imports come from Fiji, it only supplies 1.4 percent of New Zealand's fruit imports. Mr Waqabaca says agriculture is 10.5 percent of Fiji's GDP but needs to double to reach the performance of the dominant tourism industry. He says the New Zealand market is there for the taking.
"We did it before and we can go back to that level of 20 plus contribution towards our GDP. And when we're talking about opportunities this is it, this is our market share, someone else's market share is bigger. That is the opportunity, grab it from them."
There are many exporters in Fiji keen to grab those opportunities, but often they can't meet New Zealand's strict biosecurity demands. The Ministry of Primary Industries biosecurity manager, Dr Stephen Butcher says biosecurity concerns come before trade, and commercial growers must develop systems to reach the high standards. But he says smaller farmers just don't have the wherewithal to do that.
"Small volume, community gardens, subsistence farming, that sort of thing, it's really difficult to manage biosecurity efficiently around those sort of products."
Stephen Butcher says the logistics of getting products out of the islands is always hard and it's clear that longer lasting rootcrops do much better than fruit. But he says New Zealand's preference for the Pacific will always be there.
"But it comes down to marketing. I think there are some real opportunities for Fiji and the other Pacific islands actually to market a special quality product that's grown in our backyard basically, in our neighbourhoods."
Alivereti Yaya is the Sales and Marketing Manager of Fiji Agromarketing. He works with garden farmers to help them get their product to export standard, but he says the main problem is to meet demand and become reliable. He says there's demand for about eight containers of produce a month, but farmers can currently only send four or five. Mr Yaya says to get farmers from producing one month in the year to all year round calls for a real business mindset.
"A change of culture for the farmers, from a sustainable thinking to a commercial, a semi-commercial not full commercial, just semi-commercial."
Alivereti Yaya says Fiji has started to cluster farmers together in a bid for greater success. He says doubling agriculture's contribution to GDP is ambitious but can be done, and farmers now have more access than ever to the information they need to succeed.