Eco-tech training centre graduates 40 students

Islands

ABIGAIL PHOEBE
MORE than 40 students from around the country graduated from Oisca Rabaul Eco-Tech Training Centre last Wednesday after completing a year-long programme.
Oisca stands for Organisation for Industrial, Spiritual and Culture Advancement.
Director Norbert Perry, speaking during the graduation, said the institution had been practicing organic farming in the last 22 years.
“We have proven it adaptable for farming villages. It is cost-effective, and ecologically friendly,” he said.
“This promotes ecological health. We believe that human behaviour towards natural environment exploitation for survival increases at a fast rate.
“We need to recognise the approach towards dependence on natural environment and the changes that are taking place.”
Perry said for this reason the institution was now training students to focus on “productivity and sustainability” for agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
“We are focusing on moving from organic farming to climate-smart agriculture landscapes,” he said.
“This means that we are looking at climate-smart landscape agricultural systems that will operate on principles of integrated landscape management and incorporating adaptation and mitigation into management objectives.”
Perry said these included improved food security and rural livelihood and pointed out three key features of a climate-smart landscape.
“The features are; climate-smart practices at field and farm scale, diversity of land use across landscape to provide resilience and management of land use interaction at landscape scale to achieve social, economic and ecological impacts.”
But Perry said to implement smart agriculture landscapes with these features required several institutional mechanisms like multi-stakeholder planning, supportive landscape objective and tracking change to determine if social and climate goals were met at different scales for agriculture.