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Slightly over a month of assuming the Sugar Cane Growers Council (SCGC) chief executive position, Surendra Sharma already has a busy schedule ahead of him.
Sharma, who took up office last month following his appointment in October, says the council has a number of innovations in place to be put before the board aimed at moving both the council and the sugar industry forward.
He told FijiLive that there were a number of areas that had been identified with prospective opportunities to rescue the ailing industry.
“One is that we will put in requests for resources not from the Government but from other agencies and aid funds,” Sharma said.
He said other areas included increasing income and crop supplements and trialling of cane tops and cane leaves as feed supplement to allow farmers to access cheap feeds for their livestock.
“This is an important key to improving livestock and we will start these trials early next year,” he said.
“We have started talking to major processors, importers and distributors of livestock production to work together with farmers here because they are well organised as a group,” Sharma said.
He added these would be also made available to all farmers and landowners so they are encouraged to go into this.
He said talks were also under way with the Fiji Meat Industry Board (FMIB) in identifying ways of reducing reliance on imported meat through bettered livestock feeds.
“We have identified about $210 million worth of produced meat items that can be substituted with local production,” Sharma said.
He said the Council would also target import substitution.
“We have begun talks with Rewa Rice to see where we can increase production of rice right here in Fiji without having to import, particularly if we focus on farmers in Labasa where they can at least work on one acre each of rice.
“We are also talking to Feed Millers that uses maize in its feed mix so we have to increase every opportunity we have because markets are readily available,” Sharma said.
“These are some of the simple areas we are looking into so we can give farmers more incentives to spend more time on their land and better utilise it to increase their income supplements,” he said.
“There are 18,000 farmers and imagine what we can get from them if we focus on them,” he added.
Before taking up this position, Sharma was the deputy director for the European Union’s Joint ACP-EU Centre for Industrial Development based in Belgium and then as the Head of Institution between 1990 to 2000.
