Maru’s party declares war on food imports

THE country should seriously go into downstream processing of all its resources to become economically independent, People First Party (PFP) leader and Yangoru-Saussia MP Richard Maru says.
Maru said PFP would declare war on all food imports as one if its core policies.
“PFP is going to declare war on all food imports.
“Why should we keep on importing rice, dairy milk, chocolate.
“We do not need to import any chocolate,”Maru said.
“Something is wrong and we are allowing this to happen.
“It costs K50 million to build a chocolate factory, people are buying cocoa from us, processing it into chocolate and then selling it to us.
“Why can’t we process the entire 40,000 metric tonnes of cocoa we produce annually?
“We must process everything in PNG and stop the imports, we do not need to import rice, dairy, even beef.
“At PFP, we will declare war on all imports, especially food.
“Currently, we import between K6 billion and K7 billion worth of imports.
“Can you imagine how many jobs are lost in this county because we are importing?
“If we have four or five chocolate factories, we will be employing 2,000 to 3,000 of our people.
“Instead of getting K300 million for our cocoa, by processing we will double, triple the value, it will be a billion-dollar industry,” Maru said.