European Union provides €82 million for an FAO-led initiative targeting rural communities in Papua New Guinea

FAO welcomed the European Union’s support for a development project in Papua New Guinea that aims to support and strengthen sustainable agricultural chains with emphasis on assuring that rural women and youth are to benefit the most.

The five-year €82 million initiative will be implemented as a United Nations Joint programme in partnership with the Government of Papua New Guinea.

The External Action for Support to Rural Entrepreneurship, Investment and Trade in Papua New Guinea (STREIT PNG), initiative is FAO’s largest European Union-funded single-country joint-project worldwide, and it is the European Union’s largest financial contribution to projects in the Pacific region.

The STREIT project is unique and innovative, focusing on women, youth and climate change. It is the largest European Union project in the whole of the Pacific, and will focus on a particularly vulnerable region of Papua New Guinea aiming to improve sustainable and inclusive economic development and job creation.

“The project will apply an ‘all-in-one package’ approach to agrivalue development and is expected to sustainably increase production of selected crops (cocoa, vanilla) and fisheries. We thank the European Union for selecting and entrusting FAO as the leading agency for the implementation of the project,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu. “I also thank Jutta Urpilainen, European Commissioner for International Partnerships, for her support to FAO.”

Joshua Kalinoe, Papua New Guinea’s Ambassador to Belgium and the European Union, thanked the European Union and FAO on behalf of his Government.

“A majority of our population live in rural communities and are involved in small-scale farming for income generation,” he said. “The project will no doubt provide opportunity for them to increase production and expand their income base.”

The activities of the project will focus on increased economic return from cocoa, vanilla and fisheries value chains in four rural provinces of Papua New Guinea’s Momase region. They will help to create and strengthen climate-resilient, more efficient, sustainable and inclusive value chains with improvements to infrastructure and renewable energy.

The majority of the project is financed by the European Union, with FAO providing €300 000 in co-funding. The main beneficiaries are smallholders, farming families, the local private sector and entrepreneurs.

Original source: FAO
Published on 16 December 2019