The Secretariat of the Pacific Community is encouraging governments in the region to put more emphasis on developing their agricultural sectors.
The team leader of SPC's Pacific agriculture policy project, Vili Caniogo, says more than 80 percent of the region's population live in rural areas but this is not reflected in government policies.
To change this, the SPC and the EU this week launched the Pacific's second online library of government agriculture policies in Solomon Islands.
“We have created these documents or these e-libraries or these policy banks mainly because we have found that accessing these documents has been difficult. For example cocoa or even coconuts or coffee in Solomon Islands case its often not quite accessible or made available. And what is the government's priorities for this sector and these key commodities and what if any documents are out there that talk about this sector.”
Caniogo said they have created a bank so that farmers, entrepreneurs, policy makers themselves and even government line ministries can access these documents easily, read them and start engaging in discussions or planning or implementation of many of these commodities and industry development plans.