Member for Rai Coast and Vice Minister for International Trade & Investment, Kessy Sawang reaffirmed the words of Prime Minister James Marape that Papua New Guinea is capable of feeding the world.
Sawang said currently we continue to import food that can be grown and processed in the country to feed ourselves; and process and export to other countries specifically to Asian countries.
She commented that the import bill for Papua New Guinea is very high. For example, rice is one commodity alone which on average incurs K700m to K850 million import bill in a year.
“Every day millions of plates of rice are served throughout Papua New Guinea and we are transferring our wealth to the farmers in Asia by buying this rice. The question is can the Papua New Guineans farm. Of course, yes,” she added.
“There is scientific evidence shows that after the Garden of Eden, we Papua New Guineans are second after the Garden of Eden in the Bible.
“We’ve been actually farming for over 10 thousand years, that’s up in the Kup valley you find that.”
She urged people to shift their thinking; and that the government has made the right decision and choice to establish the ministry tasking them with the responsibility on how to grow the economy. Adding that creating special economic zones is one area that PNG can go into.
“Replacement of food import like what I said about rice or even dairy. We used to import about K400mill worth of dairy and now with Ilimo we are still importing around K300million when Ilimo has taken care of about K100million,” she said.
She emphasized the validity of developing the agriculture food industry to make money by expanding that. Sawang added that PNG can earn money from cocoa, coffee, oil and gas but at the end of the day, spend the money on imported food.
“Our ministry, the special economic zones we are looking at is one of the major area that we will use in setting up manufacturing to downstream processing, our natural resources like timber, cocoa, coffee …. but also look at high value items that we can produce in PNG.
“Therefore, we firmly believe that in that way we could feed the world as Prime Minister Marape said,” Sawang said.
“So when the Prime Minister said that, this is a strategic statement and we believe we can make it happen and the vehicle we will use as the strategy is the Special Economic Zones.”