Tackling food insecurity and deforestation through empowered partnerships

FAO was present at the Politico’s Agriculture and Food Summit, the annual gathering which, this year, took a virtual form. FAO’s Director of the Emergency and Resilience Division, Dominique Burgeon, and Director for Planet and Prosperity of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO), Carla Montesi joined a panel discussion on the power of partnerships for food security in Africa.

FAO-EU collaboration, though programmes such as the EU-FAO Food and Nutrition Security, Impact, Resilience, Sustainability and Transformation (FIRST) and the Pro-resilience Action (ProAct) programme, is strongly focused on enhancing the resilience of those communities to recover from the socio-economic impact of COVID-19, and to create an enabling policy environment that will support their livelihoods. The following day, FAO Forestry Department Director Mette Wilkie presented the underlying drivers of deforestation and FAO’s strategy in combating the practice, such as through the FAO-EU Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programme.