Maprik revenue increases

Maprik in East Sepik recorded a revenue of K23 million last year from agriculture, compared to K17 million in 2018. Business reporter DALE LUMA summarises district authority chief executive officer Joshua Himina’s views on its agriculture programme rollout and outlook.

IT is a belief of the district that agriculture alone can fund the entire National Budget.
We cannot depend too much on oil and gas because they are temporary and will be depleted.
If we do it right in agriculture, we will fund the entire budget of this country with our commodities such as cocoa, coffee, vanilla and the spices that we have.
We need to focus on agriculture.

Maprik
Maprik is a service centre and an economic hub of the Sepik Central districts.
We provide basic services and we cater for five or six other districts within the vicinity.
Maprik has a very unique input to our district profile which are our economic zones.
We have now about 23 economic zones that we are now moving all our interventions in the district through our economic zones.
We have a political vision to build a Maprik that is healthy, wealthy and educated.
Our theme for development is to build a Maprik for tomorrow.
We don’t want to have a stagnant district.
What we see around here must develop and grow.
If Maprik can be small town or city, so be it.
But it must be based on agriculture.
For interventions, our district service improvement programme towards infrastructure and economic development.

Economy
Maprik’s economy continues to grow.
Since 2010, it was around K4million.
In 2018, about K17million. Lately, it has increased to about K23million.
However, the major risk in our economy lies in the 10 to 30 year age group.

Our youth population has grown and we are now seeing so many lazy people around. We want to bring them back into their cocoa blocks, coffee blocks and make sure that they toil the soil so that the economy continues to grow.
We are now creating interventions programmes through the economic zones.
These are stimulus and we are trying to lure youths.
We see around Papua New Guinea that about 40 per cent of the population still live below the poverty line.
For Maprik, we are looking at an intervention that must be inclusive and people-based, not organisation-based.
We want to look an intervention were you look at the people were they must farm their own land.
For solutions, we are looking at so many things but we are doing them one by one starting with our NDB loan programmes and cocoa rehabilitation programmes with coffee and vanilla.

Commodities
We did a survey in 2018 and realised that we were aiming to get around 22 million cocoa trees or nurseries out to the people in the district.
Every family must have one hectare of cocoa trees. That was our aim. But after we did that survey in 2018, we found that we already have about 12.3 million cocoa trees out there in the fields.
So we have now changed our approach and instead of 22 million new cocoa trees, we need to go back now into our economic zones, to our farmers and rehabilitate those existing cocoa trees before planting new ones.
So if we put all these 12.3 million cocoa trees, that’s about 17 thousand hectares of cocoa planted in Maprik alone.
That is now one of our major interventions in Maprik and we are looking at that programme to run replacing all the old German cocoas and introducing the new ones.
Right now, Marpik only contributes 2000 tonnes of cocoa.
That is far less than what 12.3 million cocoa trees can produce. Maprik can produce more than that.
Our major intervention now is to make sure that we get all the existing cocoa trees up so that they must reach their full capacity, then we plant new gardens.
We have identified the main issue which is poor quality and management of the cocoa gardens due to lack of extension services and cocoa pod bora.
If we focus on vanilla in the district with the existing 12.3 million cocoa trees, by full production in 2022, we can earn about K5 billion.
That is about one third of the budget.
If we roll out this programme to about 20 other districts just on cocoa alone, it’s sufficient to cater for our needs and fund our national budget.
Vanilla is basically a huge lucrative crop and if we focus on that, it is just enough to give us K8 billion by 2022.
We have about 13 million vanilla plants right now in the district and if we can get full production, it can give us K8 billion if we can deliver.

School agriculture programme
We have an agriculture school programme which we are now trying to introduce.
We are seeing a generation of lazy people and so we can instil the farming methods right from the secondary schools in the district.
Moving away from the traditional agriculture projects like planting greens and vegetable.
We are still in discussion with the Department of Education to back it into the school curriculum.
If other districts are not willing to do it, Maprik is willing.
“This is so that we build the next generation of farmers.
Not all of them will go to universities.
Most of them will go back and stay in the village.

Target
We want to be the leading cocoa producing district in the country and from 2022 onwards, we are looking at introducing agro-industry centres.
We have done the road map of what we intend to do to establish the centres and so at least we move away from just the raw products into some process so we add value from where we want.
We would like to see all exports from our processed products out from Maprik.
So we are now looking at establishing an airport to transport products out from Maprik.
It must be registered as Maprik cocoa, vanilla and coffee.
By 2027, we want to look at establishing factories and downstream processing unit. We want to produce Maprik chocolates and other products from here.
That’s our vary ambitious timeframe and we are working very hard to get there with some of the issues that we need to address from upfront from where we are. We also want to make sure that all our economic zones must have one piggery and cattle farms each.
We have 23 economic zones which must also have a business centre, a cash agent, mini mart, fresh garden food market.