Overview
This project aimed to assist community groups and entrepreneurs in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to identify and assess product and market development opportunities for processed sweetpotato products.
A well-functioning food processing sector is crucial to farming sector sustainability. Sweetpotato processing is the major food crop in PNG, and opportunities existed for enterprise diversification to increase and stabilise farm household income through value-adding and processing. Food processing using local materials had the potential to add value, reduce freight costs, increase the shelf life of fresh produce, and create employment and income-generating opportunities for smallholder farmers and rural communities. Having been difficult for the government and industry to develop an efficient food processing sector from a very low base, this project sought to develop and test a framework from which commercially viable home-grown small-scale processing enterprises could be established.
