The Veivueti Youth Club in Fiji grew out of the damage wrought by Tropical Cyclone Winston.
The storm smashed through Fiji in February last year causing widespread destruction.
One of the affected communities was Tokou village on Ovalau Island with once flourishing farms destroyed.
The Vuivueti Youth Club was seen as part of the solution by the village youth and with the help of the Pacific Horticultural and Agricultural Market Access or PHAMA this group has been at the forefront of improving farming techniques.
The club president, Joshua Kabulevu, spoke with Don Wiseman, and told him the group wants to take their farming to the next level.
Nasau village is still shattered.
Photo: RNZ / Alex Perrottet
Transcript
JOSUA KABULEVU: We knew that we needed to work together to get ahead. Just after the cyclone when we saw that most of our kava plants, or dalo, tapioca plants, that were in the farm - all gone, all destroyed.
DON WISEMAN: What was going to be the benefit of working together rather than on your own?
JK: In the farmss in the village it is like a few hours walk to the bush and working alone you do less than when you work with a group. You can do more in a group than you can do alone because there are more hands, since we don't have any machinery. To work on the farm we have our hands and our feet and we have knives and we have digging forks which we use. So it is easier to work as a group.
DW: The aim with the youtth club, you want to go beyond just producing food locally, you want to became a commercial operation.
JK: Yes that is what we want to do, to increase our knowledge on some of the farming methods and techniques rather than the ones used by our elders tht were passed down to us, traditionally. We wanted to use the traditional ways of planting crops or kava, [but] used it with a nursery system. This is another step forwward for us so we know we can do better and we know that if we work hard we can achieve all our plans. It is really a bonus for us.
DW: In terms of looking at the commercial production of kava and so on, how far along that road are you now?
JK: We are actually in the rebuilding phase right now. We don't have a lot of planting material. In kava planting we use the stem and right now it seems most were destroyed during Cyclone Winston. We are asking for help, for the government to help us with yaqona cuttings, and we are trying to put up this nursery system, the one that we learned over in Nadi, to try and plant young yaqona plants so that after it is heard enough or strong enough and you can take it to the field to plant. Taro and cassava takes like eight months to mature and we are trying to use the best in what we have left over from Cyclone Winston.
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