Simon Cole
Compiled by RANOBA BAOA
Welcome to Hard Talk, where we pose questions to both top executives and budding entrepreneurs on some of the major issues involving business.
The agriculture industry is an extremely difficult industry to understand.
But given the right tools, the right training and the right mindset, it can be the most successful industry in any developing country.
The Fiji Crop & Livestock Council was formed three years ago to work on this and add value to Government’s existing policies and investment opportunities. And the driving force behind this is Council Chairman, Simon Cole.
Being a farmer, and a consultant himself, Mr Cole said that Government has done exceptionally well in contributing to the industry.
But where there is room for excellence there is also room for improvement.
And this is where the council, based in the private sector, steps in to represent the issues pertaining 30,000 farmers across the nation.
While the Council has registered about 6500 members, it will , by using a suite of phone base technology, get word out there they are a body that can represent the needs and match up to the demands of the farmers in the country.
The Council office is situated in Walu Street near Marine Drive Lautoka.
Mr Cole, originally from England is qualified in Agriculture Management and Development.
He told Sun Business the realities of the current state of the industry and how Government and all stakeholders can address them to provide efficient and tangible solutions for agricultural growth.
He moved to Fiji in 1983 where he started farming milking cows in Tailevu. He started his consultancy firm, Farm Consultancy Service in 1987. In 1993 he ‘put his money where his mouth was’ and purchased Saha Deo’s piggery at Vuda in Lautoka renaming it Vuda Piggeries.
Since purchasing the farm output has quadrupled and the farm rebuilt with innovative technology, at a new location on the Vuda Back Road.
This was an investment of over $3 million and has been operating successfully since then.
Mr Cole has a lot to offer industry and one of the most groundbreaking one is the ongoing formulation of a ‘living’ Farm Manual. This is likely to take the industry to a whole new level.
He tells us more in this section.
1. What do you do and why do you do it? I enjoy looking at a farm business and understanding what makes it ‘tick’ what makes it grow, what makes it survive, what makes it competitive, what makes it fail and these are some of the issues that I enjoy working on around the country.
This includes my own business because all of us farmers can get better at we do. We have to get better in what we do if we’re going to survive in this globalised market.
2. Tell us about your business? The piggery farm I run is called Vuda Piggeries and the consultancy I run is called Farm Consultancy Service which I have operated since the 80s We have owned Vuda Piggeries since 93. The consultancy has taken me throughout the region and given me an opportunity to see how other farmers tackle similar problems.
With that background I was elected to be the first Chairman of the Fiji Crop and Livestock Council. The role of the Council is to represent the private sector in agriculture to Government by explaining the business of agriculture.
3. What was the main aim of forming the Fiji Crop and Livestock Council? When Government set up the Fiji Crop and Livestock Council they said they wanted more involvement from the private sector in the developments and the planning of agriculture.
This is to encourage a joint approach between the private sector and government.
Government has done a lot over the years to support agriculture. They’ve invested in agriculture in big way. They’ve given us tax concession and other services. We believe that a lot more can still be done for farmers to make the best use of the opportunities available to them. We understand Government wants to have this new look at agriculture with the business side marrying with Government roles and ideas and concepts. And that is exactly what the Council is working towards.
And we can only do that if we represent the farmers. So we have to go back and communicate with our farmers. We have to understand what are the wants and the issues that our farmers have.
This has never been done before. No one has ever collectively represented the farmers in Fiji. The concept came out of a Cabinet paper some years ago written by the then Minister of Agriculture, Joketani Cokanasiga who brought FCLC to the forefront saying that basically Government cannot do this job alone and that it should be assisted by the private sector.
Government organized a number of industry wide workshops and as a result the Council was formed to answer the call by the farmers. In 2010 we had our first meeting of selected industry representatives. We started with a small amount of Government funding and we met once every quarter, but there is a limit to what 12 good men and women could do meeting on a quarterly basis. We saw the need to find professional and full-time help so worked to attract the funding required to run the Council on a professional basis. It’s been a slow development but its gaining momentum.
4. Tell us about the membership and why represent them? The Fiji Crop and Livestock Council is made up of commodity associations. There’s the Kava Association, Pig Association, the Root Crop Association, the Salad Crop Association, Food Processors, Goats and Sheep Associations, Dairy Association, Cocoa and Honey and all the commodity association come together under one umbrella.
Each association can operate in its own right however if the issues become national then they can bring it to the Fiji Crop and Livestock Council and we can operate at a different level with the individual associations.
5. What can you say about the financing of the Council and the execution of funds? We’ve been running now for three years. Last year we finally got some funding thorugh ITC (International Trade Centre) from the EU (European Union). The EU is very keen to see the council set up and running and I know Government wants to support this.
We’ll be receiving about $100,000 per year from the ITC and that’s sufficient for us to run an office and to have some people but it doesn’t give us a lot of money to work outside of the so-called office. So we are always on the look out to make ourselves useful and become project partners for interested donors.
6. What are some of the programmes in place that can actually help and assist farmers? There are a lot of programmes that are being developed now that will develop the Council and IT WILL GROW! It is the voice, we reckon, of 30,000 farmers. This growth will centre around the formation of the associations and our ability to communicate with our farmers and for them to communicate with us.
We have to prove that we are relevant to the farmers and to our donors. We have to sell our skills. Our farmers have knowledge, our farmers know the issue and they know some of the solutions. So it’s getting that knowledge and those solutions into the planning processes.
It’s really early days. We have completed our formal legal structure and have just signed a MOU with Government so it’s still early in terms of this development but it is showing purpose right now. And as we get closer to our farmers many of the problems that had been unstated for years will be much clearer.
When we talk about the membership systems, we’re trying to be very innovative with the way we communicate with farmers by setting up mobile phone applications which mean they can contact us and we can contact them right in the field where they work. Then you don’t have to have a meeting in town which most farmers aren’t able to attend. We plan to contact the farmer and exchange information on subjects like weather, prices, key meetings or product availability. They can contact us and say there’s a problem and what can we do to help.
So we’re trying to work smart and use these innovative technologies. I firmly believe that the flow of information is very important in terms of the development of agriculture.
We need to be able to get the correct information to farmers so communication and talking to ourselves is very important.
7. How many farmers do you have in the council? We’ve already registered about 6500 farmers in our database, but rather than waving a ‘big stick’ and say I have 30,000 farmers registered with the Council I am more interested in providing the opportunity to communicate. If we are relevant they will register with us. So we have to put out services and systems to make them want to register with us. It is now our job is to use what opportunities we have to make ourselves more relevant to farmers and to give them tools and ideas and concepts to that will address their issues and desires to the right people so that they can see their voice is being heard at the highest level in the planning of agriculture.
8. What is one most recent undertaking you managed to convince Government to override their system? In my own industry it is tackling the import of subsidized pork products. The FCLC was very supportive of the pig industry and lobbied against subsidized pork coming in from Canada or Europe. Working with Government we found a solution.
9. You say that it’s still early stages of development for the council but what are some of the things that the council has done so far to give farmers out there the hope that they truly have a voice? q We are pleased Government listened to the issues in the pig industry. As a result of our lobbying we’ve restricted the importation of subsidized meats.
q We’ve worked with Government to reduce duty on all agricultural equipment and inputs. This demonstrates that Government is very supportive of agriculture and is trying to remove all the anomalies in the duty on agriculture. This commitment was expanded and extended in the 2014 budget.
q We’re working with Marketing Development Framework (MDF) on farm rehabilitation on farms like pawpaw farms and other farmers who had been affected since in the two floods in recent year.
q We’re working to develop and become a repository for quality standards for crops like kava. By establishing a suitable standard for the quality of our products we should be able to get better markets and prices for the products that we sell
q We are going to set a coordination focus for of all the agencies that are working agriculture in Fiji. There are a number of projects like ITC, SPC, Pardi, the Taiwanese Technical Mission etc. which are heavily involved in this industry. By coordinating their efforts we can develop synergies through co-operation
q As we have discussed above we’re setting up our membership and association structures, we’re setting up our systems that we can use to communicate with farmers.
q We have the opportunity to advocate for farmers in a professional manner. At the moment the dairy industry has an issue that we’re helping to resolve by representing the industry to all stake holders
q I think the most important thing is we’ve managed to set up an establishment. Have full-time workers who will be able to assist farmers.
q We’re talking to Biosecurity Authority of Fiji with regards to maintaining the proper import controls and also on the importation of seeds that are essential for our farmers to grow the best crops. We’ve got farmers who are struggling to get access to seeds.
q Another initiative we’re looking at is insurance for farmers or crop rehabilitation because our farmers were hammered. And this is part of MDF’s work with the pawpaw farmers. We’re going to come up with a mechanism that when farmers are damaged due to natural disasters, whether its disease, whether its weather or market disasters, there’s a sponsor ready and in place.
10. What is your main focus at this point in time? I’m very keen about the Council representation for the farmers; the grassroots farmers. We don’t want to become a high-level lobby group out of touch with our base. We need to see changes because the farmers are not going to support us if nothing happens. This is what happens in the private sector. We need to be able to show to our farmers that we are effective at what we do.
11. Tell us about this Farm Manual which is likely to have a massive impact on commercial farming? This is probably one of the most exciting assignments we are involved with in Fiji. The Farm Manual is being designed and developed in Fiji and it is based on actual on farm data collected from our farmers. It will help define exactly what crops are working, what crops are not. More importantly it will allow farmers to identify what better farmers are doing to generate more income.
This manual is not a static manual but is actually a series of interlocking spreadsheets and so, very quickly, just by changing a figure on one column, for instance if the price of fertilizer has gone up, or yields has gone down, it recalculates through the entire spreadsheet. The output is an entire farm plan from technical performance parameters right through to the bankable documents required to get a loan.
It is based on our own data and I think that’s very important. We have to be honest with ourselves. It will help us to identify the reasons why we fail to achieve what we want to achieve. It will identify and test what one farmer is doing different to another farmer. It provides an opportunity to look and ask the questions in the production of our agricultural produce.
We’re going to make this available to Government and other stakeholders like the Fiji Development Bank. I firmly believe, and this is one of the roles of the Council, that sharing information and learning from the information we share is the way forwards This is what the rest of the world is already doing and we have to catch up to compete.
We are currently trying to set something up in the dairy industry. This is called a Costing Group, where all farmers from a sector put in their information anonymously into the system and then the system calculates their performance against the average or best farmers in the group. This information is then given back to them so they can see how they compare and see how they can improve.
We’re talking about improving quality, improving price, improving market, improving distribution. But we have to be honest with ourselves about what our production performances are. I think we are often overly optimistic in our planning which sets us up to fail. And the whole point of the manual is not to take the research station figures or the textbook figures for what we would like to achieve but to go and ask our farmers what they are actually achieving. What are they actually doing? What are the reasons behind what they are doing and they represent that in a planning format.
12. How do you see the road of agriculture at this point where does the council want to take the industry? I think it’s important for us to recognize what are the threats to agriculture in this country. I think one of the biggest threats to agriculture in this country is that we lose our markets to direct import-substitution like rice. I see us substituting local crops with cheaper but alternative imports for instance using potatoes when dalo is our staple crop. Why are we importing huge quantities of potatoes? I see a threat in not getting the right quality of crop to markets.
We need to focus on the right quality of crop. We cannot always accept that the quality we’ve got here is good enough for the world market. If we are to grow our exports it is in the globalised markets which are the bigger markets that we have to get it right. The rest of the world is good at producing for our markets. They have the quality, they have the price, they have improved distribution, they are technically more efficient than us and therefore we have this continuing overseas threat from producers looking to coming to Fiji. And we have to keep pace with that. Those are the issues that I see and what we need to do and what our farmers need to do, to challenge them to go forward.
13. In regards to this what are the challenges and any further comments? Our challenges are food security. We have to be able to feed ourselves and we are quite good in doing that. We need to increase incomes for our farmers. Farmers are not going to think of joining the industry if they cannot earn a good income. I know Government is worried that people may lose interest in farming as more and more people are not seeing farming as a viable career path. I think that’s a shame. But if we can find the right opportunities farmers are not naïve, farmers know when to invest and when not to invest.
The reality is that we’ve lost some farmers to other industries. So we have to make sure that the income of our farmers goes up. And that means that we have to produce to the price that will allow us to be competitive and earn a good income. We cannot sit here and expect to customers to pay a higher price they will go for cheaper imports.
This is an evolution that needs to take place. You can’t blame Government for a lack in support in the industry. In fact they have provided some very positive interventions but we need to marry these with the reality of farming in Fiji. The Council can reflect that reality.