Reporter: What did Papua New Guinea do to ensure food security in your country?
Mr. Mawe Bacchi Gonapa: Food security is a real situation in PNG. Although we grow a lot of food, its not being accessed by the population. We have a population of 7.2 million, and out of that, 85% is involved in subsistence farming, and food security is very very important to us.
And so we, the government of PNG, has got a national food security policy which is aligned with big goals, which are called sustainable development goals, and also aligned to the FAO framework of food security, that we want our population to be food secured.
So we have a national food security policy in place, which is also aligned to the national government plan which is called PNG 2050, so it is a very very important policy. We have now developed, have come up with a new policy which can run from 2017.
We have a national policy of food security, and so whatever outcomes that come from this meeting, especially the multi-action plan, we will extract what is important, and feature it, have it in our national food security plan and then try to implement some of the activities.
So we are aligned with APEC multi-action plan, we want to improve our farming practices which are responsive to climate change, and our people should grow a lot of food. And over time we want to see a very sustainable community that grows food, when we have the effects of climate change becoming very very real to our people.
Reporter: I know APEC member economies focus on applying advanced technology in agriculture. As a delegate, you hear so many ideas on applying advanced technology in agriculture. Can you tell me some of the contents of the discussions on this issue, and can you tell me in Papua New Guinea what did your country apply in advanced technology in agriculture?
Mr. Mawe Bacchi Gonapa: Well its a real challenge to use the advanced technology, or what you call climate smart agriculture, because our farmers are all rural based, you know, subsistence, so it is a real challenge for the government to adopt some climate smart technologies from our economies, especially learning experience from Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines... all the economies that have smart technologies.
These are technologies that our farmers, we will encourage them to use. So there are a number of initiatives or strategies that we will try to follow or pursue so that our farmers have the access to those technologies.
One way of doing it is to get the technology into the country through pilot projects, what are called collaborative projects, through our government or through our private sector research organisation, through our research currently known as national agriculture, we want to pilot – get the farmers to use the technology, especially like getting the information on the weather patterns, when is the right time to plant, and with the farming techniques – conservation and using drought tolerant varieties of crops or livestock species that will perform very well under the climate change conditions.
So for us its new, we want to have access and we want to allow or invite our colleague economies to come and share their best practices and experience with us.
Reporter: What do you hope Papua New Guinea will do, after finishing this meeting in Vietnam?
Mr. Mawe Bacchi Gonapa: After learning from this experience, our immediate role now, what we will do quickly is to have a work plan, because we need to prepare to host a food security week next year and that is in March.
And so we will be now organising and mobilising our technical team and policy team, even our government officials in the agriculture ministry to work together, to come up with a plan for the food security year.
For instance, we need to have the plan for the food security week, and other meetings, high level meetings, starting as of now, after this, until 2018 when we have the leaders meeting in November 2018.
Reporter: I know that APEC 2018 will be organized in Papua New Guinea. So, what did Papua New Guinea learn from this meeting in Vietnam?
Mr. Mawe Bacchi Gonapa: We have learned a lot from Vietnam. We have learned a lot in terms of what Vietnamese government is doing in the preparation of the food security week and I know the APEC summit in 2018, PNG will learn a lot from the experiences here with Vietnam, and how it is organizing the meetings, how much resources its committed into organizing the meetings, the budgets, the logistics, and getting participants from all the economies to come to Vietnam for the leader's meetings and all the technical meetings, so we're learning a lot from our colleague, from Vietnam.
Reporter: What are your ideas on Vietnam, such as on the people and tourism of Vietnam?
Mr. Mawe Bacchi Gonapa: By staying here for a week I've learned that Vietnam has got a lot of things that we will learn, in tourism, in agriculture, in farming techniques, the experts that they have to develop farming system, because we see the production of crops and livestock is at a very advanced stage, and so in terms of food security, I believe Vietnam is not a real problem.
And I think that with the population, I realise that there is more than 90 million population, and nobody is going hungry – maybe a small population is hungry – but everybody is well fed and they look healthy, so for us we want to learn a lot from the experiences of Vietnam, and use it for Papua New Guinea./.
Reporter: Thank you very much!