22 February, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ulrick Gaillard, BRA’s CEO travels to Washington D.C. tomorrow morning for a one-day visit with United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officials to discuss the progress and success of the organization’s current agricultural/cooperative initiative, under a USDA-funded Food for Progress program, being developed inside seven rural batey communities in the province of Monte Plata – and evaluate the need for similar projects in the neighboring Haiti.
In 2009, USDA awarded BRA more than $1.5 million to establish the bateyes’ first member-owned and managed agricultural cooperative to coordinate training and the development of community infrastructures and 105 acres of fertile land to produce food security and economic self-sufficiency for 35,000 beneficiaries and their families.
Under its regional Food Security program, BRA is currently distributing, through a USAID Food for Peace Program, 187.6 metric tons (more than 9 million rations) of Breedlove dehydrated lentil blend food product to 25,600 food insecure and earthquake-affected people living in Haiti’s vulnerable and impoverished border communes of Anse-a-Pitres, Thiotte and Grand Gosier and the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane “batey” communities and urban and rural barrios.
