FAO: Government must rethink school feeding policies

THE local office of the UN’s Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) wants an increase in the input of local farmers in the national school feeding programme.

It wants more local produce provided by small-scale farmers to be purchased and incorporated into the menus offered in the programme.

But with the price of local produce being extremely volatile, especially with increasing price of inputs in farming, the school feeding programme is being boxed-in, especially as it has a fixed allocation to supply meals to thousands of school children.

The FAO is now calling on Government to rethink its policies on food acquisition to get farmers to have a consistent price for produce.

During an interview at the FAO’s offices on Serpentine Road, Port of Spain on Thursday, officials spoke about the Resilient School Feeding Programs Project which started in 2021 and will continue until 2023.

The programme, FAO officials said, is the local component of a regional initiative which involves six Caribbean countries.

The main objective of the project is to strengthen the capacity of institutions and stakeholders to implement sustainable National School Feeding Programs that incorporate the purchase of products from small farmers.

At the end of the programme the FAO hopes that there would be a consolidation of the school feeding programme as an important safety net to facilitate access to nutritional food for schoolchildren and an income for small farmers.

They also want a platform for inter-sectoral and inter-institutional co-ordination to achieve food and nutrition security and serve as a viable market for farmers.

Last Monday, the Central Statistical Office said the index of retail prices indicated a 1.5 per cent increase of all items up to June 2022, including food and non-alcoholic beverages, which increased by 2.9 per cent when compared to the same period in 2021.

The increase in prices were as a result of increases in flour, ketchup and white bread but also increases in the price of several locally-grown produce including tomatoes, ochroes, melongene, green pepper, chive and celery.