THE long term sustainable strategy for agriculture is to let demand derive production and supply.
Fiji’s Minister for Agriculture Dr Mahendra Reddy said this in his address at the Strategic Development Plan workshop held at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva today.
“For so long, we were silently supporting the ideology that supply will create its own demand,” Dr Reddy said.
“So we were incentivising the farmers, giving them grants and subsidies and they continued to produce and supply.”
He said the workshop had four objectives, to:
– present and validate the Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘Theory of Change’;
– validate the five strategic priorities of the Strategic Development Plan;
– identify key outcomes to be measured under the five Strategic Priorities; and
– determine indicators to measure those outcomes.
“A well-defined strategic plan will help us with the planning, implementation, and monitoring of our Costed Operational Plans for the coming years,” Dr Reddy said.
Meanwhile, the formulation of the Strategic Plan will enable the Ministry of Agriculture to drive the agriculture sector towards modernisation and commercialisation through a demand-driven approach that ensures the sustainability of non-sugar crops and livestock production, and improves the income, food and nutrition security of all Fijians.
This initiative is funded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, in close consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture.
