Bird backs smallholders as key to local economy

By LEMACH LAVARI
EMPOWERING smallholder farmers to use their land to grow commercial crops will boost economic activities locally, says East Sepik Governor Allan Bird.
Bird said freeing up land for business was still an issue that hindered economic activities, therefore smallholder farmers should be trained to use their land for business.
He said there were about 138,000 cocoa farmers registered in East Sepik who were cultivating their own land.
He said education and training helped people become better farmers.
He said farmers could produce as much as 100,000 tonnes of cocoa, which Papua New Guinea had never been able to do.
He said that the best the country had been able to do was about 40,000 tonnes
“I am very confident that I can get these farmers to do this,” Bird said.
“We do not have a lot of land that is owned by the State, so the difficulty of bringing land into production still remains, but it is very easy to get a landowner from the village who already owns land to simply utilise their land for production. Empower the individual family unit; that is the key.”
He said it was time to stop spoon-feeding people.
Meanwhile, Bird said that in order to have a thriving small medium-sized enterprises sector there needed to be disposable income available to support it. Our effort is to try to make that disposable income available,” he said. For example, vanilla brings in about K300 million a year into East Sepik and that money goes directly into smallholder farmers and those farmers will go out and buy goods and services. That is all new money coming in. If we were to empower our 130,000 farmers and increase productivity, we would bring in as much as K1 billion in new money into the local economy which then goes directly into the pockets of smallholder farmers.”
He said the smallholder model has been largely ignored except in the oil palm sector.
Bird was speaking at the Speakers Investment Summit in Port Moresby yesterday.