FAO backs small dairies

$3.7 million-initiatives for promoting milk producers in Bekaa and Hermel

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) last month launched a new project to support smallholder dairy producers across 300 villages in Baalbeck-Hermel, and Akkar.

The two-year project will cost $1.2 million and is fully funded by the FAO.

The project, dubbed ‘Recovery and Rehabilitation of Dairy Sector in Bekaa Valley and Hermel-Akkar Uplands – Phase II’, is the FAO’s second project targeting the dairy sector in the Bekaa and North Lebanon. The first initiative, launched in 2009, was funded through a $2.5 million grant from the FAO.

The new project aims to strengthen the role of the dairy producers’ cooperatives to ensure milk quality improves, and good prices are agreed on with the dairy industry. It will also work to establish ten additional dairy coops, and install ten additional milk collection and cooling centers. The project will benefit 3,000 dairy farmers both directly and indirectly.

In its first phase the project succeeded in forging agreements between dairy farmers and dairy factories that allowed farmers to sell their milk to industrial producers at LL1,025/liter ($0.68) instead of at LL800/liter set previously.

Reported by Hanadi Chami