ECOWAS And Phytosanitary Program Proposal

UNCLAS ABUJA 002322 SIPDIS SENSITIVE FAS/USDA for Roxana Henderson E.O. 12598: N/A TAGS: EAGR EAID TBIO NI ATRD ECOWAS SUBJECT: ECOWAS And Phytosanitary Program Proposal REF A: State 205212 B: ABUJA 2283 ¶1. (U) On November 25 Economic Counselor met with Dr. Subah, who handles agricultural programs at ECOWAS. In response to the questions in Ref A, Dr. Subah reported the following. ¶2. ECOWAS has been working with the USAID West Africa Regional Program (WARP) in Accra on SPS policy harmonization. They have done surveys of SPS policy in eight countries, and are completing the rest. In the case of Nigeria the phytosanitary survey is complete, but not the animal/sanitary survey. They are also planning a conference. ¶3. Regarding the possibility of taking on funding on a sustainable basis in the future, he said that in general ECOWAS was now including a plan for sustainable funding in all of its action programs. They had recently adopted the action program for agriculture and it includes a fund to cover the programs, with proposal to shift from donor funding to member and user funding. ¶4. ECOWAS uses two main avenues to coordinate and distribute information. Each member country has an ECOWAS office, usually housed in member country ministry, often either the planning commission, finance ministry or economic cooperation ministry. ECOWAS has direct working relationships with the Ministries of Agriculture in each country. In general though, he said public information dissemination, and public relations were weak. Communications in general was another area specifically targeted for improvement. ¶5. Dr. Subah said that historically administrative and financial management had been weak, but currently they were building capacity in these areas with donor support. In the past, donor partners did most of the administrative and financial management of joint programs but this is being shifted more to in-house management. They did have a computer/information systems office which was working on getting in place database for each sector. Many were still in the development phase, however, and problems with telecommunications links between countries could be an issue. Lome had a permanent training center that could be used to house training programs. ¶6. ECOWAS is has been in existence for 30 years. Its only SPS activity is with USAID. If there is a serious problem the Director of ECOWAS could get engaged in resolving it. Currently the organization does not train regulatory officials in SPS issues. Dr. Subah was unsure whether ECOWAS did regulatory training in other areas, though they did training for customs officials. They had a meeting at least annually, and often more frequently, of the agricultural commission, which is made up of Agricultural Ministers from member countries. There were similar meetings of the trade ministers. FUREY