THE Taiwan Technical Mission in Fiji and the Ministry of Agriculture has launched the Resilient Cultivation Extension Project Fiji, targeting the urgent need to strengthen resilience capabilities in Fiji’s agriculture industry.
The $US5.4million ($F12.38m) five-year project builds on the cooperation established through the “Guava and Dragon Fruit Production, Marketing, Extension and Capacity Building Project” led by Fiji and Taiwan last year.
The plan is to establish two key agricultural resilience centres in the country, a newly-built demonstration farm in the Nausori area and the long-term cooperative Sigatoka demonstration farm.
The two centres will serve as models for resilient cultivation practices for vegetable like cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicum and fruit trees like guavas, mangoes, bananas and others.
The project’s main components include resource allocation to promote resilient crop varieties, introduction of resilient cultivation techniques and the establishment of resilient demonstration sites.
Ministry of Agriculture’s director Crop Research Division Dr Shalendra Prasad said the new project focused on building resilience against the effects of climate change and also improve production technologies to help local farmers strengthen their agricultural production.
“Mostly for vegetables to get all year-round production of vegetables like cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and capsicum,” Dr Prasad told this newspaper in an interview.
“We are importing some of these vegetables to support our hotel industry and supermarkets and with this new project we will be helping farmers to capacitate them and provide new technologies on how we can produce vegetables all year round.
“The aim is to reduce imports of these crops.
International Cooperation and Development Fund team leader Jerry Liao said majority of the resilient varieties would be sourced from Taiwan.
Mr Liao said the globe’s facing climate change issues such as heavy rainfall in Fiji that had significantly affected crops.
He said this project would assist in strengthening local agricultural productions.
The project budget is $US5.4m ($F12.6), of which Taiwan contributed US$4m ($F9.17m) and Fiji contributed $US1.40m ($F3.21m).
The project will run from January this year to December 2029.
NOTE: This article was first published in the print edition of the Fiji Times dated January 10, 2025.
