Kabul, October 4, 2018. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), through its Food and Nutrition Security Impact, Resilience, Sustainability and Transformation (FIRST) programme organized a five-day technical training workshop. This workshop focused on providing technical assistance to build the methodological and statistical capacities of government officials on two of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) - 2 Zero Hunger indicators: the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) and Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), with the overall aim of mainstreaming food and nutrition security into the national SDG debate.

Due to high level poverty and food insecurity in the country, H.E Ismail Rahimi, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Economy has stressed the need for and the importance of national ownership and stakeholder role in achieving Afghanistan’s SDG targets within the pledged timeframe. Mr. Rahimi underlined the key drivers of food and nutrition security in Afghanistan and emphasized that “this training workshop is timely because the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is in the process of setting targets for Afghanistan SDGs and their alignment to the national policies and development programs.”

H.E Hamdullah Hamdard, Acting Deputy Minister, Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, noted the important linkages between food and nutrition security and poverty in Afghanistan and said “the Zero Hunger target is not attainable unless the gap between farmers and policy makers is bridged; we need to prioritize a farmer-centric approach in our strategic planning, while also focusing on private sector engagement to increase the production of cereals so that Afghanistan can become a surplus-producing country.”

Mr. Miroslav Bonzic from European Union Delegation to Afghanistan said that the “EU ensures its full support to the Government of Afghanistan, and will work jointly to address the challenges of food and nutrition security and poverty in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Rajendra Aryal, FAO Representative in Afghanistan added that FAO possesses technical, monitoring and policy expertise and is best qualified to support the GOIRA in making the all-important connection between monitoring and policymaking; data analysis; facilitate partnerships that scale up actions, and promote multi-stakeholder participation ensuring greater ownership. Mr. Aryal also noted that the Statistics Division of FAO will help the Government provide evidence-based statistics to policy makers for informed decisions making.

The training workshop was organized in close collaboration with the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock and the National Statistics and Information Authority. It was attended by 32 participants from different ministries, UN agencies, academia and civil society organizations.