MONTEGO BAY, St James — Preparing farmers to cope with tariffs recently imposed by United States President Donald Trump was among the items on the agenda Monday as a UN-hosted workshop got under way. Participants included more than 80 farmers from 20 locations across Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The tariff issues will have impact throughout the world. We are still assessing how the conditions will be for all of the countries but, in any case, the work that we are doing here, the idea is that the organisations can be prepared for changing in price scenarios, in climate scenarios. So our work focuses on the organisations, for them to be prepared for any type of external or internal factors that may affect them,” said Pedro Boareto, manager of Farmers’ Organization for Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (FO4ACP).”

FO4ACP’s mandate is to boost incomes and improve livelihoods, food and nutrition security, and safety of organised smallholders and family farmers in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. It does this by strengthening regional, national and local farmers’ organisations.

On April 2, Trump announced “reciprocal” tariffs he had long signalled would be part of his effort to make America great again. He outlined a 10 per cent baseline tax on imports from all countries, while those that have trade surpluses with the United States (US) were slapped with higher rates.

The 10 per cent applied to most Caribbean countries, but Guyana was slapped with a high of 38 per cent. That still paled in comparison to come Asian countries. China, for example, which is now engaged in a tariff war with the US, is now saddled with a tariff of 145 per cent, after increasingly heated rhetoric from Trump and Beijing’s refusal to cower.

There are global jitters as markets and economies wait to see what will happen. In the meantime, programmes such as FO4ACP do their best to help farmers already, or likely to be, impacted, weather the storm. Absorbing shocks from the tariffs may be even more difficult because of existing challenges that have arisen from dealing with the effects of climate change.

Boareto underscored the importance of preparing organisations with systems to support members, including providing access to credit and insurance.

“What we are seeing is that the impact of climate change, for example, is one of the main bottlenecks that we have in the Caribbean, but also in other parts of the world. So [we are] preparing organisations to have quick response structures and quick ways to reach their members; provide services for them in terms of granting access to credit, to insurance,” he said.

Speaking to reporters at Sea Gardens Resort in Montego Bay on Monday, Boareto explained that the FO4ACP was concluding a four-year project that involved working with more than 40 farmers’ organisations across the Caribbean, highlighting the results of their investments and capacity-building efforts.

Within the Caribbean, FO4ACP is implemented by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, PROCASUR Corporation, and Agricord. After almost five years of implementation, the programme has supported more than 40 farmers’ organisations in the region and provided direct investment of more than US$1 million to co-create solutions and promote innovation.

Boareto further explained that the project promoted collective work among organisations from different value chains within the family farming sector, encouraging collaboration to save resources, boost productivity, and strengthen resilience against social and economic challenges through dialogue, interaction, and coordination.

“So we are promoting… collective work, dialogue and interaction and coordination between the different organisations,” he said.

Robynne Brown, member of the Golden Grove Farmers’ Association in St Thomas, was among the participants at Monday’s workshop. She had high praise for the support her group has received from the FAO project.

“We were struggling in a number of areas, but one of the main areas was accessing funding for the development of our group. [Through] this project with the FAO, [via its] learning route [component], we were able to hold down grant funding to assist with building more revenue streams,” she said.

According to Brown, her farmers’ association received funding to plant cassava.

“We should be reaping in the next eight months, and with that now we will be able reinvest and expand on the production,” she told the Jamaica Observer.