This news article is a production distributed through Caribbean News Service. It is made freely available to your media and we encourage publishing and redistribution, giving credit to Caribbean News Service (CNS).
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Nov 04 2015, CNS – Caribbean farmers are being empowered to express their needs and generate evidence that could be used to align policy research agendas.
The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) is working with the Caribbean Farmers Network (CaFAN) to achieve this objective.
“We want to help farmers to understand the environment and to be more equipped to engage with policymakers and other actors,” Juan Cheaz Pelάez, CTA’s Senior Programme Coordinator Agricultural Policy and Value Chains said.
“When we are promoting advocacy and developing capacities for policy analysis and advocacy, what we are doing is assisting farmers in understanding what are the key drivers of the business they are trying to do and what are the key obstacles.
“That is different from promoting advocacy for the sake of saying you should do this or you should do that. We are not equipping them to go out there and complain,” he added.
Pelάez noted that the capability of farmers understanding their own environment is critical if they are to make sustainable interventions.
“We are talking about advocacy around first understanding that there is a conditioning, an enabling environment. Understanding that if you are working on roots and tubers, what are the issues at the policy level that if in place would help drive this business and what are other issues that are in fact obstacles to the advancement of that.
“Once you understand that then you will advocate about the specific mechanisms that farmers and other value chain actors can together advocate,” he said.
Meantime, CTA is also supporting CaFAN by way of funding and the provision of technical support to get the views of farmers collated and submitted during the twenty-first session of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP21), which will take place from Nov 30 to Dec 11 in Paris, France.
One of the things we do is capacity building. We support them with training their members for farmers to be able to champion their cause; so that when they speak they speak with some clear facts and figures. They can articulate their positions on well-founded evidence,” CTA’s Senior Programme Coordinator Agriculture and Rural Development Policy Dr. Olu Ajayi told Caribbean News Service (CNS).
“There are various projects that we are doing with the farmers organisations in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific and in Africa,” Ajayi said, adding that depending on the type of project, the funding could be as high as US$ 250,000.
The CTA is one of the organisers of a major event here this week, aimed at developing a business approach for the agri-food sector in Caribbean and other small island states (SIDS) in African Caribbean and Pacific regions (ACP).
CTA is collaborating with the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Intra-ACP Agricultural Policy Programme to hold the fourm.
