Fiji must invest in building its market for non-timber forest products, as well as its value-added timber products. That is according to Inia Seruiratu, leader of the FijiFirst party, who stressed the importance of boosting exports of forestry and fisheries, which account for just 2.2% of the country’s GDP (or FJ$300 million a year), in Parliament yesterday.
“Focus must be placed on developing and marketing non-timber forest and value-added timber products to generate higher returns,” he said, adding to statements made by Alitia Bainivalu, Minister for Forestry, who is looking to encourage landowners to ramp up timber production on their lands.
Is Cocowood the Pacific fix for flooring?
In April 2024, Wood Central reported that cocowood – the world’s newest engineered wood product, is being developed in Fiji, with researchers and engineers across the Pacific working to capitalise on the country’s abundance of mature coconut palms to create high-value flooring products – a plan that incentivise farmers to remove disease-invested coconuts, protecting future of coconuts in the region.
“This is thanks to an old boom for coconut oil and copra,” according to Moana Bergmaier-Masau, an Engineer from the international development organisation SPC, who spoke to the ABC Science podcast about that a massive surge of coconut trees was planted during the copper boom and again after the First World War: “There was a huge surge in coconut oil at that time before canola took over, and soybean and palm oil took over after that.”
Known as the “Tree of Life”, coconuts are hugely beneficial for local communities in the Pacific; from shells to husks, fronds to copra, milk, oils, creams and medicines, they are the lifeblood of Fijian communities and businesses alike: “There’s an outer hardness on the periphery,” Bergmaier-Masau said, “and that sort of comes into the centre. Inside the wood is quite crumbly,” she said, adding that the density between the interior and exterior is much more pronounced than with other trees. “Plus, the fact that their trunks are so skinny makes things even more challenging, leaving few usable stem sections with the same density.”
Last year, Wood Central exclusively revealed that the Australian and Queensland Governments, the University of Queensland, and Griffith University were collaborating with the Fiji Ministry of Forestry and Pacific Communities to develop a viable market for the new product. Part of a suite of ACIAR research programmes, Dr Robbie McGavin, the lead researcher from the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, said the research has and continues to provide “valuable information about the characteristics of coconut woody tissue and different processing equipment that can be used to produce and dry rotary veneer and make products from the veneer.”
- To learn more about the cocowood project, click on Wood Central’s exclusive interview with Dr Robbie McGavin. To listen to the whole ABC Science interview, click here.
