ROSEAU, Dominica, Jul 8, CMC – Dominica is among 25 countries participating in a World Bank initiative to develop a food security preparedness plan.
The World Bank’s senior agricultural economist, Ava Hasiner said that the food security preparedness plan will enable Dominica to take action ahead of a food crisis.
“The plan basically aims at two big areas, helping Dominica to define food and nutrition security indicators and thresholds and to how to measure, you know when a potential crisis hits as well as the operating system and how the information is collected and passed on to senior government level officials.”
Hasiner said the plan is also aimed at helping Dominica define in advance an emerging food security situation “and it potentially helps Dominica in responding in advance, earlier than usual to those crises by going to the donor community…and seeking additional funding in responding to the crisis ahead of time”.
She said that the World Bank would like to help those countries involved in the project respond to the problems “ahead of time,” noting “usually when a crisis hits there are a lot of challenges that countries face.
‘We want to help those countries mobilise their funding and respond ahead of time. It is a very important exercise, we think that can help a lot of countries…with food prices going up and it could be a hurricane that hits the country or a disaster like a potential disease breaking out that affects food supply in the country,” she added.
The project officer in the Ministry of Agriculture, Miranda Laurent Stephenson said a presentation of the draft plan is being presented to the staff of the ministry on Monday.
She said it is a plan that started with a first mission from the World Bank in April who met with stakeholders and collected information to put a draft together.
“This is their second mission and they are going to present the draft to the ministry’s staff first and tomorrow we will have other people attending from the Central Statistics Office, the Met office , the ODM (Office of Disaster Management) other stakeholders from DEXIA (Dominica Export Import Agency) and other integral partners”.
Stephenson said the whole process of food security “is a pre-requisite for countries access funds from the World Bank”.
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