THE sandalwood industry will be a booming industry in the next seven to eight years, said Ministry of Forestry acting permanent secretary Sanjana Lal.
While responding to questions from members of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources on their 2022-2023 Annual Report this week, Ms Lal said the ministry had obtained a lot of sandalwood data from large scale sandalwood planting.
She said the ministry had also established the Sandalwood Farmers Association.
“It is all set up, so when the sandalwood matures, we have the strategy and regulation in place to be able to sell that,” Ms Lal said.
“Instead of having middleman, we should be able to either add value by extracting oil and then looking for markets rather than selling to a third party, so there will be higher returns to the landowners.”
Ms Lal said sandalwood was now the third largest forestry commodity, with pine and mahogany on the top of the list.
“We decided to start developing sandalwood once we have done about 10 years of research so there has been a lot of work done on sandalwood.
“We did, over the past two decades, large scale awareness on sandalwood as well as assisting farmers establishing nurseries, and buying from those nurseries.”
Ms Lal said sandalwood was non-destructive, good for the environment, and did not need big machines to harvest it, and it grew well on farms too.
“It grows well with molis and guavas and a lot of other crop species. I think for integrated farming, that is one of the species that we would recommend all landowners and farmers to go into, even sugarcane farmers, for their medium-term crops.
“Integrated farming is actually the best approach to go and do both agriculture and forestry. It will also be good for livelihood, food security as well as long term investment.
“It will protect our soils, and we can also do carbon trading so there is a lot of plus in having integrated farming.”
In a ministry newsletter published in 2021, it said Fiji was expecting a huge harvest of sandalwood in 2030.
It said to date, a total of 141,511 sandalwood trees covering a total area of 353.4 ha could be found across Fiji.
Between 2010 and 2022, the ministry had said Fiji exported 154,172 kilograms of sandalwood, earning approximately $12.3 million Fijian dollars, with buyers including Dubai, Hong Kong, China, Australia, and Taiwan.
