‘Cocoa, coffee could be multi-million-dollar industry’

There is market available for cocoa and coffee but people in Fiji are not producing it, says Minister for Agriculture Vatimi Rayalu.

Mr Rayalu said Taveuni in the Northern Division was once full of coffee as recently as 1995, but by 2000, it began to fade away.

“We have people coming to Fiji to buy cocoa and coffee, but we don’t have the produce,” Mr Rayalu said.

“The decline of the coffee industry was also partly due to poor decisions made by the previous Government,” he claimed.

When asked for specifics, he declined to provide further explanation.

“I will start from here as the Minister for Agriculture; our ministry has already begun planting 300 cocoa plants in Wainibuka, Sigatoka,” he said.

“We are also planning 100 acres of coffee at the same location.”

He added that once fully established, this would become a multi-million-dollar project.

“We have to learn from our history as we cannot continue to depend on primary produce,” he said.

“We have to go up looking at processing otherwise we end up with the same old story.”

He said the ministry had a commercial agriculture programme where they kept pushing for agro processing.

“We are telling our agro-processors and potential investors to come to Fiji, bring the factory and process it here,” he added.

Feedback: shratikan@fijisun.com.fj