Five Regional Commissions Sign Cooperation Framework with FAO
Reaffirming their commitment to work together to strengthen the impact of United Nations efforts towards a world free of hunger, the United Nations Regional Commissions and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) today signed a Cooperation Framework.
The Cooperation Framework is intended to build on the complementarities between the work of the five Regional Commissions and FAO. The Regional Commissions and FAO identified concrete areas for future collaboration, including the collection of analysis and dissemination of relevant data and statistics on agriculture, food security, land and water.
“With close to one billion still suffering from hunger in today’s world, the journey is still long and daunting,” said United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCAP Dr. Noeleen Heyzer at the signing ceremony. “The Regional Commissions are fully committed to working with FAO towards the shared goal of a world of zero hunger.”
The Framework will also assist member States in their efforts to implement and achieve the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), the commitments of the World Food Summit and other internationally agreed development goals
A key focus of the partnership will be sharing knowledge on policies, programmes and emerging priorities to support sustainable agricultural and rural development, food security, eradication of poverty and hunger; job creation; sustainable management of land, water and forests; agricultural value chain management; rural finance and institutions; and the impact of trade, agricultural technology and development policies on economic growth and poverty.
Additionally, the partnership will strengthen joint needs assessments, as well as joint design and implementation of key regional technical cooperation projects linking normative, analytical and operational work. It will further boost growing South-South cooperation initiatives at the inter-regional, regional, sub-regional and country levels.
The five Regional Commissions are: the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).