CNFA is pleased to announce the expansion of its United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Farmer-to-Farmer (FTF) program into Uzbekistan.
Teamed with Oasis FES LLC, a local agricultural consulting company in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, CNFA will field five or more volunteers per year in the country.
The first volunteer leaves Aug. 7 for a two-week assignment in the Fergana and Samarkand regions, where she will train agribusinesses in fruit selection, value-added processing technologies, non-refrigerated storage and marketing new fruit products. She will also assess fruit processor management and lab staff to accede to quality programs in the near future.
Uzbekistan is one of CNFA’s core countries in the Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia region, where CNFA already uses targeted volunteer technical assistance to strengthen markets and foster sustained and broad-based economic growth in the agricultural sectors in Georgia, Moldova and Tajikstan. Over the life of the five-year $7.5 million program, CNFA will field nearly 400 volunteers to assist 130 host institutions and enterprises.
In Central Asia, where most of the population depends on agriculture, CNFA will use FTF to complement USAID’s strategic objectives of developing value chain linkages to provide greater economic opportunities for rural people in this fragile and strategically important region.
To maximize volunteer impact, FTF targets specific smallholder farmers, entrepreneurs, cooperatives and associations along key agricultural value chains chosen for their high growth potential. Each assignment builds upon previous work and complements other interventions.
CNFA has been successfully implementing the FTF program since 1992 and has developed an effective model for administration, from recruitment of agricultural experts in the U.S. to successfully hosting volunteers in country. Over the last 16 years, CNFA has fielded almost 1,500 volunteers in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. During the last five years of implementation in the West NIS region alone, CNFA volunteers have facilitated the sale of approximately $15 million in fresh and processed agricultural commodities; the extension of $20 million in rural credit; and the distribution of more than $7 million in agricultural inputs and services to farmers.
Updated August 6, 2009
