Director-General’s trip to Davos and the World Economic Forum
29 January 2020, Rome - FAO Director-General QU Dongyu seized opportunities at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) to advocate for transformative change in the world’s agriculture and food systems.
The 50th meeting of the WEF, an annual event in Davos, Switzerland, for many of the world’s most powerful business, government and civil-society leaders, had for 2020 the theme “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World”. The WEF itself produced a white paper on Incentivizing Food Systems Transformation, recognition that FAO’s main areas of work are increasingly central to the most pressing global issues.
“We need to urgently change how we produce, process and consume food today,” the Director-General is quoted as saying on the frontispiece of the volume.
Dr. Qu attended a number of WEF Sessions, met with Members of the WEF Executive Committee and its Food Systems Initiative, and spoke in the informal Davos mode at various roundtable events that characterize the WEF meeting.
As a new Member of the Food Systems Initiative Stewardship Board, he spoke at a Board meeting dedicated to the future of food.
He also participated and intervened in a number of events dedicated to themes such as financing the Sustainable Development Goals, “catalytic philanthropy” in emerging economies and smallholder finance.
The Forum was also an occasion to hold bilateral meetings and discussions with numerous participants, including Queen Mathilde of Belgium, Prince Hans-Adam III of Lichtenstein, Ms. Agnes Kalibata, the UN Special Envoy for the 2021 Food System Summit and - furthering his outreach to the private sector - the chief executives of PepsiCo, Syngenta, Temasek Holdings and senior managers in charge of MasterCard’s humanitarian and development initiatives.
The global business leaders he met expressed strong interest in the activities of FAO and particularly the newly introduced Hand in Hand Initiative.
Various events at WEF were related to food system transformation- from new proteins to irrigation technologies – and Dr. Qu led a number of dialogues during his presence in Davos.
His recurring messages were that innovation is critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and that FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Initiative is designed to improve and leverage partnerships with all key players in eradicating hunger and poverty in all its forms, a point he made in an interview with the UN’s Web TV.
During an interview with China Global Television Network, the Director-General emphasized the importance of variety for healthy diets, how climate change may upscale plant and animal diseases and how the process of modernizing smallholder agriculture is a “century question”.