Dominica: CAPA to offer production benefits to farmers

Roseau, Dominica: The farmers from Dominica to get benefited from the Caribbean Agriculture Productivity Improvement Activity Project (CAPA). This is to launch on January 24, 2024, in Guyana. The International Executive Service Corps, in regard to this, has introduced a new program.

This program is a three year USAID funded program in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean, which will improve food security and strengthen the farmers’ livelihoods. Moreover, a new specialist for local market production has been recruited for the Caribbean Agriculture Productivity Improvement Activity Project (CAPA).

Considerably, a significant amount of $5.3 million is to be used to provide aid to the farmers and stakeholders under CAPA. This will promote the use of market-driven agricultural practices and technologies. Such promotion will further lead towards making the workings easy to connect with domestic and regional markets.

Moreover, the newly recruited specialist will have a significant role as he will be responsible for delivering and facilitating on-ground implementations of production-level capacity-building interventions. Such an act will be undertaken in collaboration with local partners. This will include private sector agribusinesses and public sector extension service providers. 

These people will support three of the farmer-led demonstration sites aiming at delivering training and technical assistance to enable farmers to apply improved practices and technologies which are required to meet quality and quantity specifications from buyers.

Further, there are several crops highlighted under CAPA, which are as follows:

• Dasheen
• Sweet Potatoes
• Passionfruit
• Cassava 

These are for a period of seven months with a focus on vegetable production.

Significantly, it will offer three major objectives, which include an increase in smallholder market-led production of fruits and vegetables. And the improvements in domestic and regional market linkages for smallholders, which includes agro-processors as well. 

Most importantly, the systems will transfer best practices to smallholder farmers.