The week of 27 November witnessed four days of intense review of FAO’s five-year programme 2013 to 2017 for 14 Pacific Island countries,  lessons learnt, success stories and challenges for the next five-year plan that will start in 2018, not to mention an end of year party that included an unforgettable group communication activity and Hula dancing.
 
Over 40 colleagues gathered at the office in Apia, including National Programme Officers and Assistant FAO Representatives, together with visitors from RAP and the FAO/IAEA Joint Programme on Nuclear techniques in food and agriculture.
 
The meeting considered the way forward for the next five-year plan (CPF 2018-2022) that was approved by countries during the Joint FAO/SPC Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries Meeting that took place during the Pacific Week of Agriculture last October. It heard a presentation on Procurement procedures from visiting colleague from the FAO country office in Mozambique, Martin Boben, as well as receiving guidance from Administrative Assistant Phavinee Tithipan visiting from the Asia-Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok on key administrative systems.
 
 “This was a very positive meeting, the group is very close and I learnt such a lot,” said Lee Heng who also gave two presentations on the work of the FAO/IAEA Joint Programme.  The group heard that the joint programme, was founded in 1957 and employs over 2300 staff at its offices in Vienna.
 
While relatively few Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are working with the joint programme, there is huge potential in areas such as food safety; water resource assessment and eradicating plant and animal pests like the fruit fly. Pacific SIDs that are currently working with the joint FAO/IAEA programme are Fiji, Palau and Vanuatu.

Among some of the success stories mentioned was the successful implementation in Fiji of Electronic Monitoring of Fishing Vessels (EMS), supported by FAO under a global Global Environmental Facility (GEF) project. The project focuses on sustainable management of tuna fisheries and biodiversity conservation in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) or the high seas. Fifty longline vessels received the EMS devices which allows data from the boats to be relayed directly to land.
FAO has also provided support to fisheries’ communities by providing sea safety equipment as part of efforts to assist small-scale fishers in post-cyclone recovery.

Another first in Fiji, has been FAO support for a prefeasability study on agricultural insurance for farmers in Fiji.  FAO is now assisting the government to have a product ready to roll out by early 2018, and would represent the first such scheme offered in the Pacific Islands. Extremely encouraging in this regard has been the government’s announcement in its 2017-18 national budget that it is making a separate allocation for the agriculture insurance scheme. 

In Niue, fruit tree planting, improved nutrition in schools with local producers supplying salads for school lunches and a popular “Eat local” campaign were launched under the current five-year plan.
 
In the Cook Islands, activities aimed at strengthening local capacity to develop food value chains has included production of a farm management manual; the successful implementation of a workshop on hydroponics and an accompanying manual currently in production as well as setting up a food processing facility managed by the Ministry of Agriculture that will be available to everyone in the community to use at a minimal charge, as a way of helping to assure the facility’s sustainability. 


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