ECOWAS, Others Pledge Food Security In West Africa

The ECOWAS, EU and In

ternational Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), have assured that they will ensure sustained food supply in the West African sub-region.

The organisations pledged their commitments at a two-day Closing and Capitalisation Workshop of the EU Food Facility Programme in Abuja.

The EU launched a Food Facility Programme in December 2008, and made available 1 billion Euros to respond rapidly to food crises in developing countries over a three-year period.

Under this initiative, the regional IFAD-EU-ECOWAS Food Facility programme was established with a budget of 20 million Euros.

The regional programme covered five countries including Benin, Mali, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

The regional programme designed strategies to increase production of strategic crops (rice, cassava, yams and groundnuts and mineral fertilisers) to enhance food security.

Speaking with newsmen on the sidelines of the workshop, Mr Alan Munday, EU Head of Section, National and Regional Development Cooperation, said the regional programme was a success.

He said 96 per cent of the programme had been implemented.

Munday said the workshop was aimed at reviewing the Facility Programme and building on the successes and lesson learnt.

He said that stakeholders had the responsibility of ensuring that such lessons would be sustained throughout the sub-region and implemented in the different national policies.

“So far the success of the programme has been quite satisfactory given what it was meant to address, a crisis, given the size and given the differences across the region.

“The use of the resources made available to 96 per cent is quite a high level of use indeed which shows that much is being done.

“What we have to do, and this is the subject of this workshop, is ensure that that spending has delivered outputs which are sustainable for the region, for the individual member states within the member states who were beneficiaries from this programme.

“And from there see how this can be further built on, sustained throughout the region, through the regional organisation and the national authorities responsible and thereafter to expand it to those member states within the region who were not beneficiaries in this first phase.’’

He said the EU had made available instruments to address “spontaneous new serious crisis of food insufficiency” if the need be through its EU intervention office.

Munday said that with the next phase of the programme, the EU was committed to ensuring that the sub-region is “more self-reliant and self-resilient”.

He said: “the EU will make further funding available, and has already recruited a team of experts to work on design of a phase two in support of the regional objectives to take us further.”

Also speaking, IFAD Programme Coordinator, Adriane Del Torto, lauded the success of the Facility Programme, saying that IFAD was committed to implementing benefits of the project through its existing structures in member states.

“We have approximately 96 per cent of total implementation, we are quite proud of the results that we have achieved. IFAD will be basically implementing the project through its existing structures in member countries.

“IFAD’s main partner in development have been the grassroots organisations in all the 15 member countries; they are our main target group.’’

Dr Marc Atouga, ECOWAS Commissioner for Agriculture, said the EU Food facility Programme had created unique opportunities for the commission to address food security challenges in the sub-region.

Atouga said that the ECOWAS Commission was committed to “addressing the structural causes of food insecurity in the shortest possible time”.

“It is my resolve to ensure that we will continue to implement practical initiatives that will move West Africa from a food deficient region to a food sufficient region.”

He said that the commission would embark on the second phase of the of facility programme by 2013 which would include all 15 member states.

“One was a project on ECOWAS Agricultural Information System, executed by the ECOWAS Commission; the second was a programme on the promotion of good quality varieties of sorghum and millet done by ICRISAT, and the third one was done by five member states promoting good quality seed of groundnuts, maize, millet and also root and tuber crops.

“These projects have ended so we are meeting together to share experiences, lessons learnt, so that we can replicate them, use the lessons learnt to help influence policies and programmes in the region.

“There is going to be a successor project, which will start next year and consultants are on ground trying to put the next project together.

“For the next phase we are going to include all the 15-member states.’’

The ECOWAS Commissioner also called on participants at the meeting to critically review how to collectively address the challenges of food insecurity and poverty reduction in a practical and sustainable manner.

He said: “we must translate political decisions and directives into practical and action oriented activities that will continue to food security, enhance livelihood, and increase employment and income generating opportunities for our teeming population.”

Participants at the two-day workshop include representatives of EU, IFAD, ECOWAS and International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics.