Stakeholders and partners in the West African food system met in Lomé from 14 to 18 November to launch the local storage memento and finalise the charter on the operation of local stocks in West Africa and the multi-stakeholder framework.
This regional meeting was part of the implementation of the ECOWAS regional storage strategy. The storage of foodstuffs is a very old practice in rural areas to cope with lean periods marked by food shortages and famine, as well as climatic risks. In this storage system, local stocks are of major importance in the various dimensions of food security, and more particularly (i) in preventing and managing cyclical and cyclical food crises (in deficit areas), including pastoral crises (livestock feed), and (ii) in supplying the market and national and regional food security stocks (in surplus areas).
Despite this importance, the stakeholders and partners did not have any reference documents to guide the success of storage activities at local level.
Coordinated by ECOWAS, the stakeholders have joined forces to develop a local storage handbook, a charter of good practice for local storage operators and a multi-stakeholder intervention framework.
The Lomé meeting was therefore an opportunity to bring together the stakeholders in local storage and to submit the documents drawn up to them for validation and dissemination. That is why Alain SY TRAORE, ECOWAS Director of Agriculture and Rural Development, expressed his satisfaction at seeing this process move forward with significant results thanks to the involvement of everyone. In particular, he praised the involvement of producer organisations: "Producer organisations have taken the lead in the process, both at the political level, with the involvement of regional networks, and at the more technical level, with the considerable investment of their storage managers in the production of these reference tools on local storage.
Faced with the multiple shocks facing the region, leading to an impressive increase in the number of vulnerable people unable to cover their basic needs, ECOWAS is counting on the simultaneous deployment of local storage, national stocks and the Regional Food Security Reserve.
The representative of Togo's Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Rural Development, Colonel AGADAZI Ouro-Koura, welcomed the meeting as a sign of the mobilisation of stakeholders and partners to curb the food crises facing many people in West Africa. In this respect, local storage is a solution to the fight against food insecurity.
At the end of the Lomé meeting, the memento of local storage in West Africa was launched, the charter on the operation of local storage in West Africa was finalised with the involvement of stakeholders, and the process of drawing up a multi-actor intervention framework for local storage was launched.
About Proximity Standards
- The memento of local storage in West Africa is a reference manual for the region, providing organisations involved in this activity with a clear codification of good practice in all areas relating to their activity, based on their own practical experience. It is written in a language that is easy for organisations to understand, illustrated with simple diagrams, and can be translated into national languages;
- The charter of best practice for local storage operators is a reference tool produced by capitalising on best practice in the region. It is designed to guide the development of local storage based on accumulated and capitalised knowledge, and to contribute to the gradual structuring of local organisations and their unions, federations and networks. The charter is based on a set of standards that provide minimum guarantees of good management in terms of governance, as well as technical and financial management. The charter concerns all stakeholders involved in the management of food security issues in West Africa. If storage organisations sign up to the charter, it will be easier to mobilise external support and enter into contracts with the two lines of defence.
- The regional multi-actor intervention framework defines a shared vision of local storage and its place in the overall storage system. It enables national and regional organisations to gain a better understanding of how it works, so that they can fine-tune cooperation arrangements and negotiate contractual relations with public and humanitarian institutions. It takes into account the food-livestock component
