US Charge d’Affairs, Vice Minister of Agriculture,
Launch USAID Funded Agribusiness Project

BAUCAU—US Charge d’Affairs Eleanor Nagy and Vice Minister of Agriculture Francisco de Sa Benevides jointly launched the Building Agribusiness Capacity in East Timor (BACET) recently with the inauguration of a computer room at the agricultural high school in Fuiloro on 17 May and USAID implementing partner Land O’Lakes office in Baucau on 18 May.

“This project (BACET) is an effort to improve agriculture in the region and make agricultural production and marketing viable as well as sustainable. I am confident that you will see many positive changes here in the days to come as a result of this initiative,” the US Charge said during the project’s inauguration. For his part, Vice-Minister Benevides thanked the US Government for its support and noted that opening the computer room was a good start for launching the agribusiness project. “People used to assume that agriculture is dirty. I hope that with this project, our teachers will be modern and our young people will not be ashamed to be farmers. And we will be able to produce things that the market demands,” the Vice Minister said.

Building Agribusiness Capacity in East Timor (BACET) is a USAID-funded project that aims to address fundamental constraint on human capacity within the country’s three agricultural high schools by creating a sustainable program which will produce trained technicians or practitioners in agricultural business. This activity focuses on providing faculty and students at the three agricultural institutions with hands-on operational knowledge of how agribusinesses are established, managed and sustained. Armed with a core professional agricultural knowledge, individuals trained at these institutions will be of valuable service to both the public and private sectors.

Specific project activity will focus on building agribusiness training capacity within the three agricultural high schools of Timor-Leste, located at Fuiloro (in the eastern part of the country), Natabora (in the central region) and Maliana (in the western region), through the development of a one-year post-high school certificate program in agribusiness. Programs at each school will share a common standardized core agribusiness curriculum. In addition, each school will have an associated operating agribusiness that will be used as a training laboratory for the students, with each school having its own business and technical emphasis, namely: dairy production at Fuiloro; apiculture (beekeeping and honey production at Natarbora; and horticulture, or producing irrigated high value fruits and vegetables at Maliana.

Land O’Lakes, a US-based food and agriculture cooperative, will be implementing the project together with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF).