BY TONY IROGA
For twenty-three years, Milton Seuparo has bought copra from the farmers around his village on the southern coast of Vella la Vella, carrying it onward to a market he never had any real say in.
The price was always someone else’s decision — set by exporters, almost all of them foreign-owned, who Milton and his neighbours simply had to accept.
“For most of the years I have done this work, the price was never really ours to decide. The exporters set it, and we accepted it, because there was nowhere else to go,” Mr Seuparo, copra farmer and buyer from Lambu Lambu village, South Vellalavella, Western Province said.
Then, on March 30 this year, that price collapsed completely.
Buyers who had been receiving as much as six dollars a kilogram were suddenly offered as little as two dollars — in some cases barely $2.95 — a price that could not cover the labour behind it, let alone the cost of freight to market.
For Seuparo, and for farmers like him across the country, it was the kind of day that threatens to end a livelihood.
“When that price dropped all the way down to two dollars a kilogram, I genuinely did not know how some of the farmers around me were going to manage,” Seuparo said.
Enough was enough – CEMA takes on the exporters
Milton’s story, repeated in villages across Solomon Islands, was exactly the kind of moment CEMA’s leadership had committed to never letting pass unanswered.
Allowing exporters to push farmers to two dollars a kilogram — while CEMA stood by — was the precise opposite of what Farmers First was supposed to mean. So CEMA stepped directly into the fight.
While certain exporters were offering as little as $2.95 a kilogram, CEMA moved to hold a price built around six dollars a kilogramme — a price farmers could actually plan a season, and a life, around.
It was not a comfortable position to take, and it was not without resistance from exporters who had grown used to setting the rules of this market on their own terms. CEMA held the line anyway.
The results arrived quickly. Over the following ninety-nine days, farmers and local buyers who had never once sold to CEMA — people who, for their entire working lives, had known only exporters dictating prices — began bringing their copra to CEMA instead.
They did not need convincing. They came because, for the first time, they knew exactly what price they would be offered, and that it would be fair.
This was the latest chapter in a fight CEMA had been quietly building since 2025, when the Authority held only around six per cent of the national copra market.
That six percent was never the ceiling — it was the foundation CEMA used to prove, transaction by transaction, that a fairer and more competitive copra market was possible, one where exporters no longer held unchecked power to set prices at farmers’ expense.
For Milton, 99 days that finally felt different.
Milton was one of the farmers and buyers who, for the first time in over two decades, discovered there was somewhere else to go after all.
“I had never sold to CEMA before that. None of us in Lambu Lambu really had — we had always gone through the exporters because that was simply how things worked here. When CEMA offered a fair price during those difficult months, it was the first time in twenty-three years I felt like I actually had a choice in this business, instead of just accepting whatever I was given,” Seuparo said.
What happened to Milton was not an isolated stroke of luck. It was the same pattern playing out, village by village, in every part of the country where CEMA chose to hold its price against the exporters — farmers and buyers with decades of experience in this industry discovering, finally, that exporter pricing was not the only option left to them.
“What happened to people like me in those ninety-nine days was real. It was not a promise on paper — it was a fair price actually reaching our hands, at a time when the exporters had walked away from us. That difference is something I will not forget, and it is something I hope CEMA does not forget either, because farmers like me are still here, still hoping it continues,” Seuparo said.
Why CEMA chose to fight for this
CEMA’s reasoning is straightforward. The copra management fee exists to help revitalise Solomon Islands’ rural economy — the economy that the great majority of this country’s people actually live and work inside.
Applying that fee to copra exports allows CEMA to recover revenue that, for years, had stayed almost entirely on the exporters’ side of the ledger, and to return a fair share of it to the farmers whose labour created that value to begin with.
CEMA has never framed this as punishment for exporters, and it is not opposed to a healthy, profitable export trade.
What it will not accept is a trade where one side carries all the risk — the early mornings, the harvest, the drying, the freight — while the other side keeps nearly all the reward.
That imbalance is exactly what Milton lived through for twenty-three years. It is exactly what CEMA picked this fight to correct.
“Milton Seuparo spent twenty-three years accepting whatever price exporters were willing to give him. When that price collapsed to two dollars a kilogram, CEMA refused to look away. We held the line at six dollars, and within ninety-nine days, farmers and buyers from villages like Lambu Lambu were selling to CEMA for the very first time in their lives. That is what Farmers First means in practice — not a slogan, but a price held firm, at the exact moment farmers needed it most,” CEMA said.
Photo: supplied
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