Even as Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member countries continue to seek ways to overcome what they have been pointedly told by various high profile international agencies is a regional food security crisis, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has committed to helping the region find a way of alleviate the crisis by pledging new loans to boost the capacity of its agriculture sector.
The FAO’s commitment to help pilot the Caribbean through its difficult food security times was recently re-enforced when, along with the Latin American Association of Development Finance Institutions (ALIDE), it signed a Letter of Intent to contribute to agreements designed to improve the region’s access to credit for small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises as a means of accelerating agricultural transformation and sustainable rural development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The move is reflective of an incremental building of partnerships in the region to help tackle its food security woes which, at this juncture, is showing little sign of significant alleviation. By targeting small farms for meaningful support, the Agreement reaches out to the significant numbers of small farms across the Caribbean, which collectively, can make inroads into food insecurity that afflicts poor communities in some of the smaller countries in the region as well the poor communities in some of the larger ones.
