Background
The program Farmers Organizations for Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (FO4ACP), is framed in the United Nations declarations regarding the Decade of Family Farming. It aims to increase the incomes and improve the livelihoods, food and nutrition security, and safety of organized smallholders and family farmers in African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries by strengthening regional, national, and local farmers’ organizations.
The Programme is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Union to support the Organization of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS) and it is an effort addressed to enhance rural development from a global perspective. The implementation in the Caribbean responds to a call from diverse regional actors to involve the Caribbean in these initiatives.
The FO4ACP in the Caribbean will implement activities in eight (8) countries: Belize, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia . Besides those countries and considering that they are part of different subregional/regional integration spaces, the activities also have a regional component that will emphasize on generating an enabling environment for developing the activities, fostering the exchange of experiences between organizations and the development of a common policy framework in regional integration spaces.
The eight countries part of the FO4ACP cover approximately 255.844.50 km2, except for Guyana, the other seven countries sum up only 40.874 km2 (similar to Switzerland and smaller than Rio de Janeiro), the total population for the eight countries is approximately 4.513.165 inhabitants (similar to the population of Panama). Only in these eight countries coexist around eighteen different ethnicities, six main religions, more than thirteen languages, and the population density1 ranges from 3.66 (Guyana) to 664.41 (Barbados), eight currencies, and eight different exchange rates (regarding US Dollars). All these conditions live together in widely varied geographical settings, from the hinterland of Belize to the dry forest of Grenada.
The Programme Farmers’ Organizations for Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (FO4ACP), implemented at the global level by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, aims to increase the incomes and improve the livelihoods, food and nutrition security and safety of organized smallholders and family farmers in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries by strengthening regional, national and local farmers’ organizations (FOs).
As part of its strategy, the FO4ACP focus on building capacity, improving service delivery among the Farmers Organizations, while enabling policy in the respective regions in which it is implemented.
The expected outputs include: (a) Improved capacity of FOS to deliver technical and economic services and connect their members to markets; (b) Improved access of FOS to financial services; (c) Improved business environment and smallholder competitiveness: (d) Strengthened institutional capacities and professionalism of FOS; and (e) Enhanced knowledge and dissemination among peers for replication and scaling-up
