I had the chance to meet with the new FAO Director General, José Graziano da Silva on January 16 in Rome, together with Dr. Marie Ruel, the Division Director of IFPRI’s Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division. Dr. Graziano da Silva reiterated the key pillars of his mandate: targeting hunger, supporting sustainable food production and consumption systems, achieving fairness in food system management, reforming FAO and boosting south-south cooperation. The fresh and innovative ideas that Dr. Graziano da Silva is bringing to FAO constitute an opportunity not only to strengthen our joint efforts to reduce hunger and malnutrition, but also to expand our collaboration on issues such as improving smallholder productivity, marketing information systems (under the G-20), nutrition security, and agriculture linkages to nutrition and health.

I was also glad to participate in the four-day International Scientific Symposium on Food and Nutrition Security at the FAO, from January 16-19, 2012 “From Valid Measurement to Effective Decision Making”. I had the honor of giving the keynote speech to kick off the symposium. In the past ten years there has been much progress on measuring food insecurity and malnutrition including innovative measurement methods, new indicators and mapping techniques. It is now crucial that we step up our efforts to improve information collection, analysis, diffusion and use. This will be critical in order to support effective decision-making at the country level. One of the main messages I shared at the Symposium, is that building country capacity will be key to improve food and nutrition security information as well as policy and decision-making in this area.

Tags: agriculture, FAO, food security, g20
Posted in Events, News, Speeches