HON. DR REDDY'S OPENING REMARKS AT THE STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT PLAN WORKSHOP

Consultants from FAO FIRST Program; 
Ms Itziar Gonzales
Mr Eric Siegel
EU Representative – Mr Alessandro 
Staff of the Ministry of Agriculture
Colleagues; 

Bula Vinaka & Good morning.

First, let me convey my warmest greetings to you all and thank you sincerely for allowing me to address you all this morning while you are finalizing our very own Ministry of Agriculture’s Strategic Development Plan for the period 2019- 2023. 
A Strategic Development Plan is not only something that we undertake, because it is compelled by Government. Rather we develop it as a institutional document to deliver on to the aspirations of the people of this country.

Governments are borne out of people to pool resources to help them meet their aspirations. Government represent the collective aspiration of all people in the country, to growth and development, to live with respect and dignity and to be secure. In any country, we have people with different levels of wealth and income. They derive different levels of benefits from public goods. To ensure even growth and development, to ensure the weakest is supported, we have government being given the ultimate power and resources to do so.

Within government, we have Ministries and bodies who are tasked to contribute towards this collective aspiration and vision.
The Ministry of Agriculture is a very important Ministry which has the duty to contribute to this collective aspiration and vision by ensuring that it contributes to:

1. Employment and Livelihood;
2. Nutrition and Food Security;
3. National Income and Building Foreign Reserves; and,
4. Climate Mitigating Strategies.

Now everyone in this room, and those who have not been able to make it here today have ideas. Be it a grass cutter, a farmer, a technical officer, Director or PS.

There will be differences of ideas but the vision is same.

The strategic plan is the convergence of these ideas to deliver onto this common vision.
It should bind everyone and allow everyone to move forward collectively and successfully as an Organisation. A Strategic Plan allows us to lay down the Ministry’s goals and strategies for the next five-years, based-on a sound evidence-based analysis of our internal and external environment and trends. It must be futuristic and intergeneration in nature…it must be a rolling plan. 

As alluded to earlier on, we all have strong views. Sometimes we take it personally because we grew with it. Sometimes we tend to bring in other institutions interest while contributing to the plan.

I urge you all to open up and not to lose sight of the single most important vision of growing agriculture in a sustainable manner thus ensuring that it contributes effectively to the key areas outlined above. 

You have a choice. We can roll the sector or we make some hard decisions with long term interests.

The long term sustainable strategy for agriculture is to let demand derive production and supply. For so long, we were, silently supporting the ideology that supply will create its own demand. So we were incentivizing the farmers, giving them grants and subsidies and they continued to produce and supply. It retained retirees, leisure and part time farmers in the sector. We had distorted the factor markets via subsidies and grants. We had created temporary factor markets. We were riding on the back of small holder semi subsistence farmers. So effectively government resources did lead to agricultural output growth but the multiplier effect was very low.

We need to move away from this ideology that supply will create demand to the ideology that “Demand will induce and create supply”. We strengthen demand side, organize the middlemen, collectors, exporters, buyers, structure and support them and they will send signals to the farmers to produce and supply more and more and more produce.

In this plan, we must ensure we strengthen, incentivize, resource and motivate the demand side. We should partner with buyers and exporters and we will make Fiji a major exporter of fresh produce…again in doing so, we should strength and support institutions rather than individuals if we want this strategy to be sustainable.

Colleagues, Today’s workshop for the finalisation of our Strategic Development Plan is a delightful occasion as we have in the last two years greatly anticipated the completion of this plan. Since we started drafting the Plan we have had a few consultants from our global partners that have assisted us in the process. 

At the end of 2017, a draft Strategic Plan was developed by a consultant, funded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, in close consultation with the Ministry of Agriculture. This Strategic Plan was then revised in the latter half of 2018 to be in line with new Government priorities and updated sector trends. In the beginning of January 2019, we had a two-day workshop in Nadi with key Ministry staff and stakeholders.

With the urgent need to complete the Strategic Plan, we are very grateful to FAO for funding a consultant again to work with us. I’m looking forward that this time around, with this theory of change we will be able to illustrate how strategies and outcomes will enable us to achieve our desired impact and actually finalised this plan. 
Colleagues, it has taken a long time to get here, but I am very happy that we have finally reached this stage. Let’s not lose momentum and continue to push through to ensure that we come up with the best plan for Fiji’s Agriculture Sector.

Today’s workshop has four objectives: (1) to present and validate the Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘Theory of Change’; (2) to validate the five strategic priorities of our Strategic Development Plan; (3) to identify key outcomes to be measured under these five Strategic Priorities, and lastly (4) to determine indicators to measure these outcomes. 
A well-defined Strategic Plan will help us with the planning, implementation, and monitoring of our Costed Operational Plans for the coming years.

Furthermore, it will allow us to better measure our performance and adjust in a timely and effective manner where necessary, with the goal of achieving our desired impact. 

Colleagues, It is therefore of utmost importance, that you actively participate in today’s workshop. This is our Strategic Plan, and therefore it is up to us to ensure that it properly reflects the Ministry’s vision of what the agriculture sector should look like in five-years from now. You will be the ones implementing this Strategic plan, and it is therefore absolutely vital that you take ownership of it. 

As such, I encourage all of you to actively participate, discuss and share your experiences today. With these closing words, I wish you all the utmost enthusiasm and success for the finalisation of our Strategic Development Plan for the period 2019-2023. 

Thank You, Vinaka Vakalevu & Dhanyavad.