Access to Nutritious Food-Dietary pattern is shifting away from the traditional diet of root crops to more of a cereal-based diet. Starchy staples of root crops provided 22% of total energy in the diet while cereal-based foods contributed 38% to the total dietary energy per day.

Fiji has high dependency on food imports where 69% of calories were imported while only 31% was sourced locally in 2010. Fiji is burdened with Non-Communicable Diseases, Communicable Diseases and Micronutrient deficiencies such as anaemia. In the last 10 years, anaemia is still a problem in all age groups from children under 5 years (63%), 5-14 years (45%), 15-17years (43.5%), adult 18 years and above male (32.4%) and female (48.2%) and pregnant women (40%).

Poverty and Inequality, Ministry of Agriculture- At national level, the proportion of people living below the poverty line was 29.9%. More people in the rural areas (41.5%) compared to urban areas (20.4%) are living below the poverty line Household heads who have more members in the household are found to be poor.In observing the relationship between agriculture and poverty in Fiji, it was found that 41.4% of the rural population live below the poverty line, whereas 73.4% of the rural population lives in agricultural households. In terms of rural households, 45.5% of rural households live below the poverty line, while 86.6% of these rural households are agricultural households. This reiterates the need to develop the agricultural sector to alleviate poverty in Fiji.

Safe Food, Ministry of Health & Medical Services- In Fiji 14 cases and 2 hospital admissions of food borne diseases were reported in 2018.Some key aspects proposed for the discussion include enabling policy and regulatory standards to protect consumers, upgrading and accreditation of current laboratories for testing foods for monitoring and compliance purposes, creating more awareness and collaboration on enforcement to relevant stakeholders, multi-sector collaboration to enable more participation for wet markets to farmers markets, more awareness and understanding of evidence-based approach for food safety, empower consumer voices and innovations in the food safety system. Food safety challenges include limited resources, limited knowledge and understanding with decision and policy makers on Food Safety, multi-sectoral strategy on ensuring food safety.