Int'l support vital to transforming Fiji's food systems: minister

The international community has played a vital role in transforming Fiji's food systems, Fiji's Agriculture Minister Mahendra Reddy said on Wednesday.

While opening the two-day Fiji Food System Dialogues Validation Workshop in Nadi, the third largest city of Fiji, the minister highlighted the country-specific binding constraints that curtailed the sustainable development of agriculture and food systems in Fiji.

He singled out the lack of farm mechanization as a glaring indicator of Fiji's incipient agricultural development model, an aspect that needed urgent action from international parties to help progress farming practices towards fully mechanized farming models.

"The reason behind coordinating and organizing global food summits is to reach an agreement on how we mobilize resources on a global level and pass it onto the country level so that we can address some of the issues at the country level," said Reddy.

"What we need from the Global Food Summit is assistance in developing our mechanization," he added.

Reddy said that to better understand farming and food systems, it required identifying these constraints to enable bold new transformative actions while delivering on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), each of which relied, to some degree on healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems.

"It is now more than ever, that Fiji needs to protect its food system, especially towards post-COVID-19. We urgently need multi-sectoral collaborations to address short-term plans and long-term implications of the interruptions to our food system, caused by the pandemic," he said.