The Plant Health Clinic Training, held for the first time at the Ministry of Agriculture, aims to enhance the skills of the ministry’s extension officers and identify potential plant threats to bolster Cook Islands’ farming sector.

Facilitated by the European-Union funded SAFE Pacific Project implemented by Pacific Community (SPC), the training will be held over six days targeting pests and diseases as well as the soil.

The training is delivered by SPC staff, Dr Rohit Lal, soil scientist, and Nitesh Nand, plant health laboratory technician (entomology), at the Ministry of Agriculture Office in Arorangi.

The training aims to train extension officers on how to identify, diagnose and provide suitable management practices to mitigate crop pest and disease problems encountered by farmers.

As a practical exercise, trainees will also conduct a clinic with farmers in a farming locality to expose their learning during the week.

According to Nand, the main purpose of this training is to train the ministry’s extension officers to become good “plant doctors”, and to combat the threat of these invasive pests in the Pacific.

“That’s our main purpose and it’s a big challenge for us but at least we can know how best we can prepare our future external officers to be good doctors,” Nand said.

“They’ll be doing a lot of trainings in the lab, in the rooms, plus outside and we’ll be having a plant health clinic day on Friday so we can judge how well we have prepared our extension officers to tackle problems with the farmers.

“What we have seen through plant health clinic, we have encountered certain pests and diseases like fall armyworm and little fire ant.”

Through these plant health clinics, SPC has collected information from other small Pacific countries like Samoa, Tonga and Solomon Islands, and is now doing so in the Cook Islands.

Plant health clinics (PHCs) is a global movement to address the need to better serve farmers, particularly the vast majority of small holders, towards timely management of their key pest(s) and disease(s) problems confronted by daily operations.

The PHC programme was piloted in the Solomon Islands in 2012, in Samoa in 2014 and in Fiji in 2015.

According to Nand, not all extension officers can directly reach farmers for training due to time constraints. Plant health clinics offer an alternative approach where farmers can come to them for training and support.

From his perspective, it’s ideal to get all the farmers gathered at the Ministry so the plant health doctors can conduct what they do.

“And you can get some invasive pests and disease, it’s a real threat for us, it has already reached some of the small island countries so this is the time to show strength and strengthened energy to combat these pests and I am happy that biosecurity is also involved here,” he added.

Nand said they cannot currently identify any specific pests as they have yet to conduct the plant health clinic. However, they expect to identify and register various pests during the clinic, which will be held on Friday.

Secretary of Agriculture Temarama Anguna-Kamana said it is important that the workshop include sessions on both plant and soil health considering the importance of good soil health in managing plant pests and diseases.

“I note that the training will include both theoretical and practical sessions and staff commitment is pertinent to staff learning as much from the training,” Anguna-Kamana said.

“There will be some training of pesticides especially targeting the use of organic and safer alternatives and proper use of pesticides and importance of following the recommended time span and harvest and sale of the crop for food safety.”

Anguna-Kamana also proposed that a few test questions would be included at the start of each day to refresh staff recollection.