Sunday 22 June 2014

Nepalese taking local farming practices back home

Sita Bantha Magar has been running her farm near Kathmandu for two years, which she started with imported seedlings from Holland.

She supplies to the local area.
"First I tried to do a business in mushroom... the market was also fluctuating you know, there was no price regularity.
"Later I came to know that the flower production has a very continuous, and not fluctuating market price and very systemised market in Kathmandu.
"We have to send our flowers to the wholesale market and they will distribute, but in other crops like vegetable and mushroom brokers are playing in the middle."
Sita is involved in the United Nations Micro Enterprise Development Program (MEDEP), which helps women, the poor and marginalised groups make a living.
It's been running for 15 years, and has seen about 60,000 micro enterprises supported across Nepal.
Sita's role is to advocate for the agro-enterprises to the Government, and to support those businesses with marketing and technical advice.
The enterprises cover a range of fruit and vegetable based operations.
One example is a strawberry farm that has been supported by MEDEP for ten years.
"It has a very huge potential in Nepal to uplift the economy of the country if we could export to the other countries. Recently there had been export to India, but Government is not serious about its potential.
"The farmers are making very good money... they are selling fresh fruit to the supermarkets, they have got very good price and they can also process to other diversified product for the low quality fruit, like they are making jam, jellies, chocolates, so there is very less wastage."
Central Queensland University is collaborating with MEDEP and two staff at CQU nominated Sita for a Crawford Fund scholarship which she was then awarded.
Now Sita is in Rockhampton receiving hands-on training and learning about supply chain management and technologies on local properties.
"Farming here is very advanced like use of the machines in cutting, pruning, everything.
"But in Nepal maybe the landscape is hindrance for us because we have the hills and no machines can be operated in that location, but in low hills we can do, I think that is the question of investment over there.
"And the size of the farm here I saw these are called small farms, but this size is the big farm in Nepal."

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