Dominica’s agricultural sector is to receive US$300,000 from the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in emergency support with the aim of bringing the island’s productivity levels back on track.
FAO’s Programming Officer, Anthony Kelman said since the FAO team’s arrival on the island they have been “heartened” to see the country’s resilience despite the damage caused by Tropical Storm Erika and so decided to assist.
“This augurs well for the recovery effort going forward,” he said at a consultation at the Fort Young Hotel on Thursday. “In light of this the FAO will provide Emergency Support for the recovery efforts to the tune of US $300,000 to restore the agricultural productivity in the country.”
He stated that these resources have been assigned to support the efforts of the government in the recovery of the country.
“We are happy to see that the government is focusing its attention in the medium and long term on agriculture development,” Kelman stated.
He informed that the consultation comes at an opportune time since Dominica’s programming framework will come to an end on December 31st 2015 and a new one for the next four years is expected to be in place by January 2016. The consultation was held to deliberate on the new programming framework.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Harold Guiste, said the consultation came at a good time since it followed a forum on agriculture following the storm held earlier this week in Anse De Mai.
“Erika has left us with some critical decisions to make in relations to our food systems, utilization of natural resources, particularly the land, our management of risk and climate change,” he said. “While we cannot expect the country’s programming framework to resolve all our issues in agriculture and rural development, it presents an opportunity to provide critical priority areas in the agricultural landscape in Dominica at this time which falls within FAO core technical competencies.”
He added that they will take comfort in knowing that the programming framework is a working document “which can be reviewed and revived.”
Guiste also called on the participants to make the best use of the consultation to ensure that the country benefits fully.
The United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is preaching and demonstrating the very same message many of us patriots have been preaching for many years, which is, “If you want to change a person’s life give him a rod so he could fish, instead of making him depend on you for fish” like this present dlp administration has been doing in Dominica for many years now.
Another thing I must complement the UN for is for helping us realize that agriculture is our bread basket in Dominica and if we are going to turn things around in this country it has to be through agriculture. I do hope skerrit and company are seeing beyond the $300,000 and understand the message the UN is trying to teach here.