Even as Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member countries continue to seek ways to overcome what they have been pointedly told by various high profile international agencies is a regional food security crisis, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has committed to helping the region find a way of alleviate the crisis by pledging new loans to boost the capacity of its agriculture sector.
The FAO’s commitment to help pilot the Caribbean through its difficult food security times was recently re-enforced when, along with the Latin American Association of Development Finance Institutions (ALIDE), it signed a Letter of Intent to contribute to agreements designed to improve the region’s access to credit for small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises as a means of accelerating agricultural transformation and sustainable rural development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The move is reflective of an incremental building of partnerships in the region to help tackle its food security woes which, at this juncture, is showing little sign of significant alleviation. By targeting small farms for meaningful support, the Agreement reaches out to the significant numbers of small farms across the Caribbean, which collectively, can make inroads into food insecurity that afflicts poor communities in some of the smaller countries in the region as well the poor communities in some of the larger ones.
The overall aim of the exercise is to seek to realize more robust strategies through which to enable more effective financing of agricultural undertakings in the region, the end objective of which is to enhance food security and, by extension, reduce rural poverty. Some of the critical tools that the initiative is seeking to employ include studies and research, training, dissemination, and exchange of information among the participating individuals and groups. “These initiatives will focus on strengthening development banks’ financing and technical assistance policies and strategies to support agricultural and agro-industrial production units, financial inclusion of small and medium-scale producers, and financial and non-financial services to improve access to credit for small and medium-scale agricultural enterprises,” the FAO has gone on record as saying.
With adequate financing being critical to the effective undertaking of this initiative, the FAO, ALIDE have signed a Letter of Intent which the two expect will metamorphose into agreements to initiate undertakings designed to improve access to credit for small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises that can be strategically significant in hastening agricultural transformation and sustainable rural development in the Caribbean and Latin America. The FAO said that these undertakings seek to target the strengthening of strategies to enable the effective financing of agriculture and rural development, as a whole, along with its overarching objectives of improving food security, reducing rural poverty and promoting gender equality through initiatives that could include studies and research training and exchange of information.
