The first in a series of eight consultations across the Caribbean to identify priority agricultural, health and food safety and fisheries needs for development of country action plans kicked off in T&T this week.The national consultation on the EU-funded project, Support to the Caribbean Forum of ACP States in the Implementation of Commitments, undertaken under the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA): Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures, is also aimed at increasing production and trade in agriculture and fisheries. It was attended by a cross-section of public and private sector stakeholders at the Hyatt Regency in Port-of-Spain.The Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA) is implementing the 11.7 million Euro project on behalf of Cariforum over the next 42 months. The Caricom Secretariat, the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) and the SPS Committee of the Dominican Republic, are partners in the project.
Underscoring the importance of the SPS project, Gregg Rawlins, IICA representative, T&T, said it is essential to integrate Cariforum countries into the global economy."It is one that can play a major role in terms of trade and not just regional markets but access to international markets," he said at a brief opening session before participants broke into working groups to engage in discussion.Monica Paul-McLean, representing the Delegation of the European Union to T&T, said IICA was selected to implement the project since it had both the technical capacity to deal with SPS issues and had a presence in almost all Cariforum countries. Paul-McLean said the EU, the biggest donor of development assistance around the world, firmly believes regional co-operation can help address the challenges of globalisation and mitigate limitations of small and insular states.At the end of the project, she said, the EU expects to see tangible results, including solving the problem of a lack of regional and national administrative capacity in connection with the EPA provisions aimed at assisting Cariforum to gain and improve market access, complying with Europe's SPS measures and to help Cariforum states to better develop their own regionally harmonised SPS measures.
Describing the SPS project as far-reaching and ambitious, Dr Robert Ahern, manager, IICA Agricultural Health and Food Safety Programme, Costa Rica said the project, which is consultative in nature, seeks to arrive at the best solutions for a myriad of challenges facing the Caribbean agriculture and fisheries sector."It's been our experience that the top-down approach just don't work, so with this sort of project, it is critical to get buy-in at an early stage from a group of stakeholders and that's our goal in T&T and throughout the Caribbean. We're hoping to make the process as inclusive as possible and we're hoping as we progress through this programme and this project, we get continuous feedback so that this intervention has the greatest impact that it can have," Dr Ahern added.Dr Richard Blair, IICA co-ordinator, Caribbean Regional Agenda based at the Caricom Secretariat, said the SPS project has the potential to address the inhibiting factors to sustainable growth and development of regional agriculture.Commending the involvement of the beneficiaries in the consultation, Dr Blair said: "This participative approach is fundamental for the necessary ownership required for any realistic aspirations of the effective delivery of the results as envisaged."