As the Secretary of APHCA, I would like to thank all the participants for your active participation and your valuable contributions over the last few days. I would also like to thank our facilitators for keeping us on task and helping us formulate what looks to be a significant document. This workshop may well be a milestone in dairy development in the region.
On behalf of APHCA, I can confirm our commitment to smallholder issues. We have been working on these issues since 2004 and have, at times, struggled to keep the funding coming in. The results of this workshop are very encouraging and when we report back on what has taken place here I am confident that donors will see the need for continued funding. In the meantime, APHCA would like to offer our website as a platform for continued dialogue and follow up.
On a personal note, I have a strong interest in breeding and genetics and have initiated two CFC projects in these areas. I have had feedback from some of the participants here who are also interested in genetic improvement and the role of ruminants in greenhouse gas production. Not many people appreciate that if we can genetically improve animals to be more productive we can decrease the amount of GHGs emitted. We currently have approximately USD 200,000 for smallholder projects and we may be able to convince the board to increase this amount.
We have enormous challenges ahead of us. If this workshop is any indication, I am confident we can meet those challenges. Have a safe journey home and thank you for coming.
This has been a most pleasant and challenging week. It has been a wonderful experience to meet so many people from so many sectors and countries, all focused on a single purpose. It is inspiring.
I think we have achieved a lot in the last few days and our strategy is taking shape. Next, our facilitators and consultants will prepare a draft and circulate that for our review. CFC is looking forward to using that strategy to develop more smallholder dairy projects in the future in this region. The value of a strategy is that we can use it to selectively focus. It will take some years to see the outputs of our efforts here this week, but I am confident we have taken a big step in the right direction.
On behalf of CFC, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Thailand as the host country and for the great kindness you have shown us all. I think we can all be pleased with the outcomes of this workshop.
Considering the limited time we had, we accomplished a great deal. At the same time, we need to pause and reflect on what we may have missed. As dairy farmer practitioners, did we really focus on improving the standard of living for smallholder farmers? It is a fact that many children of small farmers in this region emigrate to places like New Zealand to seek work. We are good at exporting labour, but what are doing to attract new people to dairy farming?
We have also yet to discuss how to integrate public and private cooperatives and we need more sharing on information on models for dairy production. We have heard many good ideas here this week, but donors and governments have been scaling back funding for agriculture in general and we need to push harder to get that funding back. One way of doing that is to disseminate the outcomes of this workshop to national stakeholders, and we will be doing that in the months ahead.
In the coming months, we will be drafting the final version of the strategy, taking into account the outcomes of this meeting. Once that draft is complete, we will be sharing it with you and other national institutions and we hope to receive you comments. By the end of May 2008, we will have a final strategy, which we will then put in the public domain.
Some of the follow up activities we hope to initiate in the short-term include: a ‘Dairy Asia’ information network, to be hosted by APHCA and improved productivity interventions through FAO’s Technical Cooperation Programme facility.
In closing this workshop, I would like to express a sincere thanks to Nancy Morgan and Brian Dugdill for their efforts in organizing this workshop. Thanks also to our able admin staff, who have been working hard behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly. I must add a special thanks to our Rapporteur for his unique contributions to this workshop. Finally, thanks to all of you for making this workshop such a success.
