M.O.A. signed to improve small famers’ productivity
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) have signed a memorandum of agreement. The project seeks to increase small farmers’ productivity for income and employment generation in rural communities and to strengthen small farmer’s capacity. The contract is co-financed by the European Union, who is contributing almost fifty-one thousand U.S. dollars and the Mainstreaming and Capacity Building for Sustainable Land Management project in Belize, to the tune of forty-six thousand U.S. Signing on the dotted line on Tuesday was Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Rene Montero, UNDP Rep Kristine Blockhus and Executive Director of CARDI, Dr. Arlington Chesney. At the ceremony both Montero and Chesney spoke of the project’s importance.
Rene Montero, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries
“To perform services in respect to the establishment of two integrated farming systems, to develop five good agricultural farming sites nationally and to conduct capacity building with farmers’ groups on and off farms, farm management, good agricultural practices and the use of effective agro techniques; to design and to construct post harvest models and to enhance the capacity of farmers in appropriate produce-specific post harvest practices.”
Dr. Arlington Chesney, Executive Director, CARDI
“The government of Belize had a significant amount of foresight in thinking about this project. Before the food crisis, we had one in six people of the three hundred billion people in the world in poverty and hunger. Since then—in a year now—we’ve had a hundred million more people moving into poverty and we have found that the production of food is growing much slower than the production of the population and therefore it is very likely that we may be unable to buy food even though we may have the money and therefore the question of food security at the national level and at the regional level becomes even more important than it was a year ago.”
