Brighter days ahead for the Ginger Industry

Submitted by TemoL on Mon, 06/09/2010 - 2:40pm

A one day workshop was held at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Narere to discuss the way forward for the ginger industry.

The workshop was attended by senior officers from the Department of Agriculture, the private sector mainly the exporters and the Land Resource Division of SPC.

While opening the workshop Permanent Secretary for Agriculture, Mason Smith said that the workshop was the follow-on initiative taken by SPC Facilitating Agricultural Commodity Trade (FACT) to further explore how best to achieve the goal of producing quality, disease-free ginger seeds to our growers in order to improve exports.

“Ginger no doubt is a product of high demand throughout the world and can be readily grown and value added in Fiji,” said Mr Smith.

Mr Smith said that the workshop was organized to discuss criteria for the selection of potential suppliers of ginger seeds and identify possible sites to reduce risk to the loss of planting materials through natural disasters.

Growers and exporters realized that lack of quality planting materials was due to the spread of soil- borne pathogens.

“This workshop will assist Department of Agriculture and the private sector to facilitate the establishment of nurseries or seed multiplication centers to produce quality and disease-free planting materials at the industry level with the appropriate technical back-up services,” said Mr. Smith.

Mr Smith added that there are plans to move the industry to the Western and Northern Divisions to get the optimum production to meet the growing market demand.

Principal Agriculture Officer North, John Cox said that there is a big potential for ginger industry in the North and it should move to the North which can grow the crop under irrigation.

“Despite being a potential industry, Fiji’s ginger industry has slowed down in the recent past. Fiji produced 2,488 tonnes of ginger in 2008 compared to 3,111 tonnes in 2007 as a direct result of disease infestations,” said Mr Smith.

Mr Smith said that there are competitions for the ginger markets and through discussions like this, strategies will be mapped out to strengthen the ginger industry.