KOTA KINABALU: Sabah strives to sell its agro-based products locally and globally as a lot of them are not known to consumers, State Agriculture and Food Industry Minister Datuk Junz Wong said.
Hence, he called on all quarters to cooperate and play their roles in promoting local products, besides asking the relevant departments and agencies under his ministry to take proactive roles in the marketing efforts.
“However, agro-based small and medium industry entrepreneurs must also make a conscious move to complement the efforts of these bodies. We have a lot of quality local products. All we have to do is enhance the packaging and promotion,” he said in a statement here, yesterday.
Wong said hypermarkets or supermarkets, as well as convenient stores must also be passionate about Sabah products and provide strategic and prominent spaces for them in their stores.
He also encouraged government agencies and entrepreneurs to collaborate with the local institutions of higher learning offering agricultural and agribusiness courses, as well as leveraging the lecturers and students knowledge to further empower local product development.
In related development, Wong said Koperasi Pembangunan Desa (KPD) was in the midst of registering Sabah food or non-food products to be promoted on online shopping platform jd.com with whom the ministry had an understanding with. However, Wong said Sabah needed at least 500 products before jd.com would help set up a Sabah based products online marketing platform.
“Therefore I call all small and medium industry agropreneurs to come forward and register their products. This is an opportunity for our local products to be introduced to the global market,” he added.
He said Sabah Agriculture Department, KPD and KO-Nelayan were working with the Standard and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM) Bhd through its Packaging, Security and Design Centre in developing packaging for local products for the markets.
The ministry will also help empower local producers of ethnic drinks such as ‘lihing’ to improve their quality and packaging to enable them to be marketed as tourism products similar to Japanese ‘sake’ and Korean ‘soju’, he added. –Bernama
