George­town–The In­ter-Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co-op­er­a­tion on Agri­cul­ture (IICA) and the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) have signed an agree­ment sup­port­ing de­vel­op­ment and mod­erni­sa­tion of san­i­tary and phy­tosan­i­tary mea­sures ap­plied in the Caribbean, with a view to im­prov­ing ac­cess to the Eu­ro­pean mar­kets for agri­cul­tur­al prod­ucts from this re­gion.

The agree­ment was signed in George­town, by the di­rec­tor-gen­er­al of IICA, Vi?ctor M Vil­lalo­bos, and the am­bas­sador and head of del­e­ga­tion of the Eu­ro­pean Union, Robert Kopecky, with­in the frame­work of the XII Caribbean Week of Agri­cul­ture.

Based on this agree­ment, a pro­gramme of san­i­tary and phy­tosan­i­tary mea­sures that will have a life span of 42 months and a bud­get of US$5.8 mil­lion will be im­ple­ment­ed. The ben­e­fi­cia­ry coun­tries are the mem­bers of Car­i­fo­rum–An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Ba­hamas, Bar­ba­dos, Be­lize, Do­mini­ca, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Grena­da, Guyana, Haiti, Ja­maica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, Suri­name, and Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Vil­lalo­bos said: "We in IICA are thrilled, not on­ly to be part of this ac­tion, but al­so to have been cho­sen by the EU to ex­e­cute it. We of­fer our tech­ni­cal ca­pac­i­ty, our net­works of spe­cial­ists and our pres­ence on the ground in all the coun­tries of the Caribbean".

Speak­ing on be­half of the EU, Kopecky point­ed out: "Mar­kets are con­stant­ly open­ing up, and we in the Eu­ro­pean Union are very keen on part­ner­ing with the coun­tries of the Caribbean. There­fore, strength­en­ing the agri­cul­tur­al health of the goods we trade will ben­e­fit every­one con­cerned; and IICA un­der­stands this per­fect­ly."With the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the pro­gramme, Caribbean pro­duc­tion and trade will be in line with in­ter­na­tion­al pro­to­cols and stan­dards in agri­cul­tur­al health and en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion.

IICA and the EU will car­ry out ac­tions aimed at strength­en­ing the le­gal frame­work in which san­i­tary and phy­tosan­i­tary mea­sures are ap­plied in the Caribbean, at both the na­tion­al and re­gion­al lev­els.Stan­dards and guide­lines with re­spect to food safe­ty will be al­so strength­ened.

There is al­so a plan to cre­ate a net­work of na­tion­al and re­gion­al in­sti­tu­tions that deal with these top­ics and to de­vel­op ini­tia­tives for ex­change of in­for­ma­tion and co-op­er­a­tion in mat­ters re­lat­ing to an­i­mal and plant health, in which the au­thor­i­ties, tech­ni­cal com­mit­tees and in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies will par­tic­i­pate.

The pro­gramme al­so in­tends to strength­en the hu­man re­source ca­pa­bil­i­ties, as well as im­prove the in­fra­struc­ture of agri­cul­tur­al health sys­tems in­crease the ap­pli­ca­tion of good agri­cul­tur­al and man­u­fac­tur­ing prac­tices, en­hance the use of lab­o­ra­to­ries, car­ry out risk analy­ses, and de­tect pos­si­ble dis­ease out­breaks in a time­ly man­ner.

The agree­ment is part of a joint strat­e­gy to sup­port de­vel­op­ment of agri­cul­ture in the Caribbean and ben­e­fit small farm­ers in par­tic­u­lar. The strat­e­gy in­cludes an­oth­er four-year project called the Agri­cul­ture Pol­i­cy Pro­gramme de­signed to strength­en the le­gal and in­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work of agri­cul­tur­al re­search, tech­nol­o­gy and in­no­va­tion, as well as ac­cess to mar­kets.The bud­get for the two pro­grammes amounts to some US$27 mil­lion.