There has been a great awareness rise among trade and agriculture stakeholders on climate change and other things, which bind them.
The observation was made at the closure of an eight-year project on Promoting Agriculture, Climate and Trade Linkages in the East African Community (PACT EAC 2) organised by Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) in Dar es Salaam, yesterday.
Leading the project, Head of Private Sector Development Unit in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Mr Ezamo Maponde, said the scheme has been successfully implemented and brought together different stakeholders.
”It was informative and trained more and on advocacy action, where hundreds of stakeholders from the government, business, civil society, media academia and farmers attended,” he added.
Mr Maponde further said that the government has formulated several policies in order to support the EAC Private Sector Development Strategy (PSDS) and National Development Vision 2015.
On her part, Prof Fortunata Makene, ESRF’s Head of Strategic Research and Publications, explained that the yesterday’s meeting was the 8th National Reference Group (NRG) meeting that aims at assessing the implementation of the programme and way forward.
She said for four consec utive years of implementing the project, the main focus was on looking at how issues of trade and agriculture could be linked to climate change issues.
“So in the past eight years under this project, we have been doing policy advocacy over issues of agriculture, trade and climate change
As we close the project we should look at how we achieved this mission,” she said.
During the implementation, the ESRF has been working with stakeholders in preparing position papers and on how to integrate issue of climate change in trade and agriculture.
“For instance when the government was about to review the trade policy, we prepared a position paper that looked at issues of climate changes and presented it to the same government for consideration,” she said.
However, Prof Makene commended the government for considering most of policy recommendations made on trade, agriculture and climate change.