Ray Kwingu, a cocoa farmer from East Sepik, struggles to put his children through school with the 300 cocoa trees he and his wife, Jenny, cultivate.
Being his sole income source, the money is stretched to cater for school fees, medicine and nutritious food for their family.
“One of my kids left school because we could not pay the school fees. The school fees for another studying in secondary school is still to be paid, and we need to settle it soon,” says Ray worriedly.
The 63-year-old father of five from Varigu Village has less than 0.5 hectares of cocoa. Despite he and Jenny’s best efforts, their cocoa garden yields less and less each year, challenging them to find other ways to cover their household’s basic needs or to cut back on them, like taking their kids out of school.
At the beginning of 2021, Ray enrolled in the FAO-led, European Union-funded programme for Support to Rural Entrepreneurship, Investment and Trade (EU-STREIT).
The programme focused on providing farmers with better-yielding cocoa seedlings that had been naturally cloned through bud grafting, natural technique that allows replication of seedlings with desirable qualities. Grafting is the act of placing a portion of one plant onto the stem or branch of a rootstock in such a way that it will continue to grow. Then the rootstock is eventually replaced by the grafted “clone” (bud) and transplanted in the cocoa garden.
Not only are these seedlings better yielding, but they are also more tolerant to the cocoa pod borer pest.
Since 2013, the Sepik region has been invaded by this pest, leading to a significant drop in production of cocoa. In 2013, total cocoa production in the region was more than 12 000 tons, whereas in 2016, production had been reduced to less than 9000 tons. The invasion of the cocoa pod borer has forced farmers to gradually abandon infested cocoa trees, leading to the closing of 58 percent of cocoa seed processing factories in the area.
Ray and other farmers not only received these new resilient inputs, they also received training in this bud grafting technique so that they could continue this work once the programme ends. Cloning seedlings through bud grafting allows farmers to rehabilitate their farms, cutting down old cocoa trees and replacing them with the grafted ones that are less at risk of a cocoa pod borer infestation.
“The new seedlings and skills allow me to expect an increased cocoa production, and with that increased income, I can transform the living conditions of my family,” explains Ray.
Since joining the programme, Ray has rehabilitated 300 cocoa trees through budding and grafting cocoa seedlings.
“Before enrolling in the programme, I had no idea how to bud cocoa clone seedlings, how to conduct block management, including cocoa pruning, field lining, shade control, disease management, harvesting or how to dry and store cocoa beans properly.”
Ray intends to triple his garden by planting an additional 600 cocoa pest-tolerant seedlings.
Ray is just one of 696 farmers in the Maprik District supported by the programme in partnership with the national, provincial and local institutions. The programme implements similar activities in nine other districts in East Sepik and Sandaun (West Sepik) provinces. It also works on improving the value chains for vanilla and fish, other important products for the island’s Sepik region
The EU-STREIT programme focuses on providing support throughout the entire cocoa value chain from its cultivation to the semi-processing and marketing of cocoa products by improving farmers’ access to information and financial tools and further enhancing the performance of the country’s existing institutions through assessments and capacity strengthening.
“In order to realise transformational changes at the institutional level in Papua New Guinea, the programme is addressing agri-value chain issues in the country. It provides both direct support to beneficiaries and advisory and analytical assistance to the government, to improve policy and create a business-enabling environment,” says Xuebing Sun, Coordinator for the EU-STREIT programme in the country.
Cocoa is the third most significant agricultural crop in terms of its economic importance to Papua New Guinea and contributes over PGK 300 million (approximately USD 100 million) to the Gross Domestic Product annually. About 151 000 households (representing over 2 million people) in the coastal regions of the country depend on cocoa as a main cash crop and the success of cocoa production hugely affects livelihoods in the country’s rural areas.