Fishermen will soon be able to relax as there is a new initiative where they can receive compensation if they are injured or suffered loss of property. The recent initiative, funded by the World Bank, is called the Caribbean Fisheries Risk Insurance Fund.
This can be an ease for local fishermen as in the past they have suffered losing equipment and even been victims of piracy at sea. Programme manager of research and resource assessment Elizabeth Mohammed said there was a study and they were in the process of moving forward with proposals for the fishermen.
Mohammed said that during her presentation, titled Building Partnerships and Alliances to Scale up Climate-smart and Adaptation Solutions in the Caribbean, at yesterday’s Caribbean Pacific Agri-Food Forum which is supported by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the European Union. The forum is taking place at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, Barbados.
Mohammed said fishermen were at a high risk for injury, loss of life and property, the impact on livelihood but contributed to national food security and impact of climate change. She said the organisation identified fishing assets which could be insured. She said they were looking at up scaling an early warning and emergency response system and information on weather.
Mohammed said they were not sure how the lionfish came to the reefs of Tobago. She said the sargassum seaweed may be related to climate change and could be used for various projects. Steve Maximay, of Science-based Initiatives in Grenada, said some successful initiatives did not reach stakeholders.
"My definition of success is where the farmer or producer is benefiting," he added. Maximay said there was a lack of understanding when it came to the needs of the farmers. He said it was unfortunate that some of the people who studied climate change picked and chose which area of the environment they wanted to study.
"A number of farmers appreciated the need for adaption. The reality is approached in piecemeal (nitpicking) and even successful initiatives don't reach stakeholders,” he added. Ricardo Gowdie, production manager and co-founder of Revofarm, said one in three Jamaicans were farmers yet agriculture contributed only 6.5 per cent to the GDP.
"We can combine weather, market and field data and provide farmers with action information, via SMS and Web application," he said. He said Jamaican farmers suffered a 28 per cent loss due to climate change and farmers were taking ten years to adopt to new climate practices and Jamaica imported one billion worth of food.
Gowdie said their solution was to send daily field-level forecasted weather updates, pest and diseases, climate smart tips and other data.
—CAMILLE CLARKE in Barbados