ROSEAU, Dominica, 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 the food security preparedness plan will enable Dominica to take action before a food crisis.
“The plan 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 that “usually when a crisis hits, there are a lot of challenges that countries face.
‘We want to help those countries mobilize their funding and respond ahead of time. It is an essential 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 that the draft plan will be presented to the ministry staff on Monday.
She said the plan started with the first mission from the World Bank in April, which involved meeting with stakeholders and collecting information to create a draft.
“This is their second mission, and they will 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 food security process “is a pre-requisite for countries access funds from the World Bank.”