The Tavioka Growers Association is focusing its attention on gathering substantial data from farmers around the country in order to better understand and gauge the gaps as well as the opportunities in the industry.
According to the association president Josaia Rayawa, the Tavioka Growers Association had established the business arm.
“They are called a Tavioka Growers Ltd (TGL) and so the company has been established.
“TGL will be responsible for the business management of the Tavioka Growers Initiative.
“Since the COVID restrictions back in the first quarter of this year, the focus and attention has been to use this time to establish for the Tavioka Growers Association, a kind of fact finding survey form, a survey reaching out to the farmers all over the country.”
He said the intention of this survey was to establish data and understanding of the tavioka growers profiles out there in the marketplace before the association stepped out into the business environment.
“The survey and the questions that we’ve highlighted, focus primarily on understanding the strengths and the weaknesses that farmers currently face and to ascertain also from them, some of the opportunities that they see themselves, in pursuing it for themselves.
“The tavioka growers on its own, in developing value add opportunities, is just one entity, as farmers they have an opportunity to pursue, to supply the frozen tavioka food market which is run independently in this country and other ways.
“So we want to ensure that the farmers have every opportunity to pursue every angle to sustain their current business.
“But as far as the Tavioka Growers Initiative with regards to developing, creating value added with starch, with flour and all that for the future, the priority is to secure by the end of this year full data that we hope to derive, from 300 or more farmers across the country,” added Mr Rayawa.
This would set a platform for the association to be able to understand and ascertain clearly the direction which it wanted pursue according to the president.
He said through that, the association could empower the TGL to be able then pitch themselves in the market environment.
“This data also allows us to be able to pitch our position with institutions who offer grants, with government institutions, and with the private sector entities because for a lot of the data in reference to agricultural or even specifically with tavioka, it is often three or four years, too old.
“So the importance of having up to date, from grassroots understanding of farmers in totality will enable us to be able, to position as such so data can reflect better our needs and what we need to do strategically and what we need to achieve.”
Mr Rayawa said this journey for them was not one which could be done overnight.
“We’ve completed 50 years in this country or the journey in this country and economically it has identified a lot of challenges and perhaps a lot has to do with the lack of full commitment towards one particular industry to see it right through.
“What we want to do as the Tavioka Growers Association, is to be able to take charge of our destiny, we bring together a collective mind-set and influence that a united collective group can contribute, and use that for our benefit.
“So we were not just totally reliant on government or on things that are providing subsidies and all those related things, we want to have a stake in the ways that we would want to run our businesses.”
Majority of the members according to Mr Rayawa, were individual farmers or landowning units or church groups.
“A lot of their undertakings have been run independently on all these different categories,” he said.
“So it’s important for us as an association to solidify our understanding through data that we’re collecting, that’s why during this COVID period it’s been a perfect time for us to be able to keep driving this message of people filling out surveys.”
Mr Rayawa encouraged the farmers to use the survey form which was available on the Tavioka Growers Association’s page on Facebook.
He said the data gathered from the farmers who had answered the survey was substantial in providing clarity of the situation on the ground.
“In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been running we’ve been running FB live video out to farmers. It’s like a 300 per cent increase in the number of forms that are coming in and they’re still coming in.
“So in the next week and a half, we’re going to do another FB live, where we will share some of the data that has come through, where the management team of TGL have been assessing the data and putting it in proper perspective to get us to understand a bit more.
“When we get to have a point where the sample reach is representative of say to the level of 5000 farmers then we’ll start to divulge some of these data to share nationwide.”
He said primarily the reasoning behind the data was to support their strategic document which they have completed this year.
“That will be accompanied by this data to grant institutions because as an association our desire is to be able to be a credible voice, the farmers collectively want to be a credible voice.
“Others have been carrying the voice of the farmers but the end result is always been disappointing, because of the lack of commitment to complete the journey.
“The role that the Tavioka Growers Association will play in supporting the efforts of Tavioka Growers Ltd, to pursue the business side.”
The market and the business side was something Mr Rayawa said they did not want to rush into it because TGL, as management team has been involved in receiving goods and tavioka from all different parts of the country.
This also included turning it into flour and sharing those flour samples with different food scientists in Koronivia and USP to help them understand and gauge the ingredients or the mineral contents in the fl our from the tavioka which was harvested from different places in Fiji.
