Agriculture
FAO's Doing Much in the Region
Samoa, which has a few cows, wants to build up a dairy industry for itself. Tonga wants a bigger dairy business too. The Cook Islands hopes to improve local meat supplies by building up herds of goats on its outlying islands. In Kiribati plans are being made to boost coconut production by eliminating the rats that attack young nuts.
Back in Samoa there is relief about what seems to be the success of using a flatworm predator to attack one of most dreaded newcomers to the Pacific Islands, the Giant African Snail, a voracious consumer of vegetables.
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There's alarm about the pollution and poison danger presented by the pile of decaying imported pesticides around the region. Pesticide stockpile reports have been written for Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Niue. In the Marshall Islands, Red Spider Mites are a pest to be eliminated from backyard garden crops of capsicum, eggplants and pawpaw. The list of Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) projects around the region is a long one and currently adds up to a financial input of around US$25 million.
The FAO was founded in 1945 with the purpose of improving levels of nutrition and standards of living, agricultural productivity and the life of rural populations.
It is now the largest United Nations specialised agency and the lead agency for agriculture, forestry and rural development.
It opened a sub-regional office in Samoa in 1996.
This has seven specialisation areas: food and nutrition, fisheries, integrated natural resources, farming systems development and marketing, plant protection, forest management and agricultural policy.
Other of its current projects include looking at possibilities for seaweed farming in Vanuatu, helping Tonga write fisheries laws and work to decide whether the Cook Islands could make good money by growing sandalwood. Surveys of the status of the food industry and standards of quality have been completed for the Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu and one for Tonga is being completed.
Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu have national nutrition profiles updated and national nutrition codes have been drafted for the Cook Islands and Tonga.
FAO is helping with the setting up of Pacific Soil Net. This will be a network covering the use of land, water, soils and natural resources which when electronically integrated will be a basis for dissemination and sharing of information.
Since mid 1997 Samoa and Tonga have been working with FAO on establishing a regional reference centre for milk processing and marketing. Dairy training for both countries shows that milk production in the South Pacific can be a profitable alternative to meat production.
France financed the project and a second phase for similar work in Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands is under evaluation.
Pending final approval, a US$300,000 project on meat product development and process will be focussed on Samoa and the Philippines as satellite centres. Elsewhere around the region the FAO is running surveys of honeybee pests and diseases, assisting with agricultural censuses and statistics, looking at the control of the African Tulip Tree, another introduced pest and advising on helping farmers recover from the affects on their land and crops of hurricane damage.
At Vou village, Fiji, women are being advised on making money from small scale pig farms. Villagers at Nainumu, in Central Province, Papua New Guinea, are being helped to go into the commercial poultry business.
