The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has offered technical support to Samoa's Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to address rising commodity prices impacting the country's food systems.

The UN agency handed over the physical and technical support equipment to the Ministry in a Thursday ceremony attended by senior MAF officials and the FAO Subregional Coordinator for the Pacific Islands, Xiangjun Yao. A media release on the ceremony was distributed by the Government Press Secretariat on Thursday.

As part of an FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) Joint Project called the “5F Crisis” –  which monitors the rising cost of food, fuel, fertilizer, animal feed, and certain financial statistics – it aims to support participating governments in increasing their technical capacity to analyse, predict, plan and respond to the impacts of the global crisis of food, energy, and finance on their national food systems.

The FAO has developed the 5F Light Early Warning System (LEWS), which aids in this effort based on economic statistics such as the Consumer Price Index and key lead indicators such as the cost of fuel and animal feed and their impacts on food costs. The system helps countries better predict economic shocks, thus enabling more informed policy-making by governments in the region. The FAO has trained representatives from the MAF Policy Division on adopting LEWS and handed over the matrix of indicators to ensure continuous monitoring of the 5Fs.

Ms. Yao said in the statement that the LEWS has benefits and through training governments around the region can now better understand how global fuel prices affect local petrol prices. 

“One of the strongest influences on the cost of food is the cost of fuel. Through this LEWS training, governments around the region now have a better understanding of how, and how soon, global fuel prices affect local petrol prices, and how and when petrol prices affect the cost of food," said Ms. Yao.

"Similar forecasts can be made with other indicators such as the cost of fertilizer and animal feed as well as trends in remittances. Taken as a whole, LEWS is an effective tool for more informed policy-making by national governments."

The FAO is also providing short-term physical assistance to MAF including laptops and tablets for monitoring the ongoing 5F crisis among MAF divisions, barbwire fencing for noncommercial cattle farmers, and vegetable seeds and local planting material for rural food security. These items will be distributed by MAF to communities at a later date.

Similar training and physical support are being provided to the other nine participating countries in the region: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Niue, Nauru, Palau, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. FAO will continue capacity-building efforts with national governments around the region as they take over key 5F monitoring infrastructure that FAO has created.