FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific – a ‘modern, paperless affair’

Dhaka - It is the first half of 2022 and the regional conference season at FAO. Traditionally, that involves FAO Staff in the regional offices gathering large amounts of information and documents, compiled for our Members across the five regional FAO offices.

Over the years, the amount of paper consumed by these regional conferences was staggering and it was time for a change.

To service 250 delegates from more than 40 countries at the FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific every two years, traditionally, thousands of pieces of paper would be printed, including some 250 copies of every paper, every official document, each and everyday, usually for five days. And of course that meant printing each document in each of the FAO Official languages of the region.

In APRC34, for example, the Regional Office (RAP) in Bangkok shipped dozens of boxes of FAO publications, everything from global Flagships to brochures and one-pagers on projects and programmes, but by the end of each conference, too much had been printed and much of it was shipped back.

That was 2018. Four years later, we’ve had an evolution, if not a revolution, in the way the APRC is rolled out - and part of the innovation is in documentation distribution.

#APRC36 pushed the photocopiers into a back room and made history as the first-ever paperless, fully digital, FAO Regional Conference.

All the pre-session papers were posted on the webpage of the APRC. The “Order of the Day”, a key tool for Delegates, was not printed, but emailed to registrants, web-posted and displayed on an electronic board outside the Plenary Hall, together with the QR codes to download the session documents in the region’s four official languages. The draft report of the Regional Conference was also distributed to Members electronically.

Another innovation in the evolution from paper-heavy to paperless, was the introduction of a “written correspondence procedure”, which foresaw Members sending their comments on any conference paper or document to the Secretariat by email. Subsequently, the Secretariat replies were posted in a password protected website for Members only - this exchange transformed the regional conference from a once-off event to an ongoing dialogue.

The FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific also made history by being the first Hybrid Regional Conference for the Region, and the first to have more than 1,000 delegates registered.

This is the way of the future, which made the #APRC36 a modern, fully digital and paperless FAO Governing Body session.