The Diplomat
Spanish Cooperation has renewed its commitment to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) for the use and financing of the agency’s logistics base in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
As reported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) in a press release, the two parties have extended the WFP’s stay at the logistics base in the Gran Canaria capital by four years, and Spain will contribute a total of six million euros until 2026 to support food prepositioning and transshipment work, in order to strengthen the capacity to respond to food crises in West Africa.
The logistics base in Las Palmas was established in 2012 thanks to an agreement between the WFP, Puertos del Estado – which is providing the storage space needed to set up prepositioning and transshipment operations for food and other emergency goods – and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, which is providing the funding through the AECID. The Cabildo de Gran Canaria, for its part, collaborates by ceding the use of part of the base’s facilities.
Since its opening a decade ago, the Las Palmas base has played an important role in WFP’s food prepositioning and transshipment strategy, with special relevance in improving the humanitarian response in West Africa. Since 2015, the base has supported the Global Food Management Facility (GCMF), an innovative WFP financing system based on pre-purchasing food when market conditions are most favorable and storing it in strategic locations so it can be dispatched quickly when needed, which has reduced the average food delivery time from 120 days to 38 days.
“The permanence of WFP in the Gran Canaria capital for four more years not only evidences the quality of its port services, but also reflects the common commitment of Spain and WFP to strengthen the humanitarian response capacity in a region with disturbing levels of hunger and malnutrition, further amplified by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” added the AECID.
