Over the past three months, COLEACP has been targeting its activities under the two Fit For Market programmes to help reduce the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on agricultural and food supply chains in ACP countries. One element of COLEACP’s Covid-19 action plan is market access and food security, with the aim of:

• providing ACP producers/exporters and their professional organisations with continually updated information on developments in logistics and in national, regional, European and international fruit and vegetable markets
• facilitating the marketing of ACP fruit and vegetable production at local, regional and international levels where access is disrupted.

To this end, COLEACP has developed a simple website to collect production information by sector via national and regional organisations/federations/associations and transmit it to local and regional buyers. Other information, for example on logistics, will eventually be integrated.

A presentation and testing phase has begun in collaboration with national horticultural trade associations in the following pilot countries: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.

The local websites enable each professional organisation involved to collect the offers of its producer members and then send them to buyers, who are being identified and mobilised by local COLEACP experts.

For example, FEPAF in Guinea has used its website to facilitate access to buyers of chilli peppers, potatoes, and processed products such as mango juice.