Photo Credit: Papua New Guinea Today
According to an agriculture official, the nation spends K1 billion on rice imports each year.
Stephen Mombi, DAL deputy secretary technological development division, warned that as the world's population grows, rice consumption would skyrocket, necessitating more imports.
He stated that rice has a tiny market of approximately 10%, but as the world's population grows, that market area will decrease, demand will rise on both a domestic and international basis.
“So, we as a developing nation also importing competing with other countries to import from that small market space hence we must grow rice domestically because the population is increasing,” he said.
“So just estimate that by the year 2050, the population might go up to 10 million.”
“We are consuming about 400,000 metric tonnes of rice every year and per capita consumption is about 35-40 kilos per person annually.”
According to Mombi, the government has developed a national rice policy for the period 2015-2030, which focuses on recruiting large-scale private sector investment into rice production.
“When that player comes in and then you mobilise all smallholders to participate in rice farming by supporting them with technical advice and machinery,” he said.
“We need to cut down on that and encourage domestic production by involving the smallholder farmers so that we increase domestic production,” he said.
Reference:
Tom, Patrick. Post-Courier (8 June 2021). “Rice Imports Costly”.
