FAO Director-General meets European Commissioner for International Partnerships

The FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, met at FAO headquarters in Rome with H.E. Jutta Urpilainen, European Commissioner for International Partnerships.

The pair discussed the importance of the EU FAO partnership. The cooperation spans a wide range of areas around agrifood systems transformation; climate change, biodiversity and science and innovation; one health, foresight initiatives, and innovation and knowledge sharing, amongst others.

The Director-General thanked the Commissioner for the longstanding support from the European Union and for its active Membership, as the only Member Organization of FAO, for more than 31 years since 1991.

The Commissioner underlined the importance of FAO as part of the wider UN system, and its role to help achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In that respect, the pair agreed that deeper UN collaboration, in particular among the three Rome-based Agencies, is fundamental to address the urgent global food security challenges. In that context, the impacts of Covid-19, the climate crisis and the war in Ukraine were also discussed.

The pair also discussed possible pathways towards agrifood systems transformation and its different dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the key role of the private sector was also discussed, and the Director-General recalled the FAO Strategy for Private Sector Engagement that reflects a new forward-looking vision for strengthening strategic engagement with the private sector towards achieving the SDGs.

The Commissioner referred to the recently adopted priorities of the Council of the European Union for an effective FAO to ensure a sustainable future and food security for all, which underline the key contribution that FAO needs to make in driving the transformation towards sustainable agrifood systems, as well as in addressing the intrinsically linked challenges related to the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation.

The Director-General invited the Commissioner to use the new Digital FAO as a platform to share the vast amount of knowledge available within the European Union with other Members.