Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Money to help Pacific nation’s horticulture crops

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A donation of $13 million to help boost South Pacific horticultural exports has been welcomed by Horticulture New Zealand.
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As one outcome of the largely low key APEC conference in Papua New Guinea, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said the $13.5m, spread over four years, is for the Pacific Horticultural and Agricultural Market Access (PHAMA) Plus programme.

The cash will help Fiji, Papua New Guinea and other Pacific island nations including the Cook Islands and Niue improve crop productivity, production quality and capacity to meet biosecurity standards of customer countries, including NZ. 

“This was a programme that started some time ago and helping these countries get up to standard to send their products to the likes of NZ and Australia is a good thing to do. It is some serious money that has been put into it,” Horticulture NZ chief executive Mike Chapman said.

NZ ministers also agreed to accept another 1750 Recognised Seasonal Employer staff from the Pacific Islands, taking the total likely to be working here this season to about 12,850 a 16% increase on last year.

“Pacific producers struggle to gain and maintain access to international markets due to a range of challenges such as meeting the quality and biosecurity standards of export markets, maintaining a reliable scale of production and dealing with increased frequency and severity of adverse weather events,” Peters said.

Other Pacific-centric agri programmes work on dairy in Fiji, cocoa in Samoa and vanilla in Tonga.

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