The ECOWAS Commission, has so far mobilised 1.8 billion dollars from multilateral sources and bilateral donors for the implementation of the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), an official has said.

The Principal Programme Officer (Agriculture) at the Commission, Dr. Ernest Aubee,  told  newsmen in Abuja that the regional organisation had created a 150-million-dollar agricultural fund and was also in the process of setting up an agricultural agency.

These processes, Aubee said, were preparatory to the implementation of the regional and national agricultural investment programmes as stipulated in the CAADP framework and policy.

He said that the 15 member states of ECOWAS had also developed and started implementing their individual national agricultural investment plans in line with the ECOWAS Agricultural Policy (ECOWAP), fashioned after the CAADP.

The focus of the investment plans, he explained, was addressing the challenges of food insecurity and issues of poverty and livelihoods.

To achieve the set goals, he said that priority crops had been identified including rice, maize and cassava as well as livestock.

In addition to crops, he said that the organisation was also re-jigging policies on market access, free movement from one country to another, transportation and road network, among others.

Aubee expressed the hope that the food security situation in the region would improve if the programmes were well implemented.

“We are implementing a multi-pronged approach to address the food insecurity situation in the country.

“For example, we have identified priority crops like rice, maize, cassava. We have also identified livestock. In addition also to these priority crops that we have identified, we are also looking at policies.

“Policies dealing with market access. Are farmers able to produce and sell? What are some of the bottlenecks in terms of marketing within our respective countries and also within the region?

“We have issues of transportation and road network; we also have issues dealing with movement from one country to the other; so the ECOWAS Agric Policy is trying to address all these issues in a very holistic manner.”

On funding of the investment plans, the programme officer said that some member states had already accessed funding from the Global Food Security Programme Fund (GFSPF) being administered by the World Bank and some bilateral donors such as Spain and USAID.

According to him, part of the funding provided for the Food Facility Programme being funded by the EU would go to ECOWAS Commission while part of the money would be channelled directly to the individual member states.

“The total envelope for implementing regional programmes and national programmes is 900 million dollars and we are getting funding from a variety of sources. We’ve got over one-billion-dollar commitments coming from different institutions around the world,” he said.

Aubee said that the ECOWAS Commission had been very active in coordinating the implementation of CAADP in West Africa as mandated by the AU Commission and the NEPAD agency.

“CAADP is a continental agricultural programme and that programme we have domesticated in the form of ECOWAP, which is ECOWAS Agricultural Policy to make sure that what has been agreed by our leaders at the AU level is now domesticated at the regional level; at the ECOWAS level, so we are working very hard toward implementing the various declarations.’’

Aubee noted that African leaders were progressively striving to fulfill their commitment of allocating 10 per cent of their national budgets to agriculture as contained in the 2003 Maputo Declaration.

He commended the efforts of the African leaders and urged them to do more, noting that agriculture was linked to rural livelihoods, which if improved, would lift majority of the African population out of poverty.

“Agriculture is such a very vital sector. It is also linked to rural livelihoods; so if we improve agriculture, we are going to improve the livelihoods of a large number of people in the rural areas who form a very substantial part of our populations and who are the producers of the wealth that we all enjoy.”