Simon: Agriculture Dept needs to have a rice policy

AGRICULTURE and Livestock Minister John Simon says rice is still a programme under the Department of Agriculture and Livestock (DAL) and it is time it gets all the support it needs through the development of a rice policy.
Simon said this in Port Moresby yesterday when announcing the new DAL acting secretary Dr Nelson Simbiken.
He said apart from other outstanding legacy issues and a need for proper policies to drive the sector forward, a rice policy was one of them.
“We also need a policy on rice, we want to do rice, we cannot continue to import rice, but I need a policy paper on that, it is still not done.”
Simon said having visited Bangladesh recently, a country with more than 163 million people and in an area of estimated 148,460 square kilometres, they were rice sufficient.
“When you look at PNG, 460,000 square kilometres, our arable land is well over 300,000 square kilometres,” he said.
“They (Bangladesh) are rice sufficient, they are one small country that can feed their own people, we can’t, we keep talking about it (local rice production), these are some of the things that we need to correct the papers and do these.”