Read-out of the FAO Director-General’s meeting with Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Rome - FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, and IAEA Director General, Rafael Mariano Grossi today met to discuss ways to strengthen the FAO-IAEA partnership.

The IAEA Director General of noted that the partnership with FAO is an increasingly important facet of the IAEA’s work – and a unique example of interagency cooperation in the UN family. The updated collaboration arrangement signed by the FAO and IAEA principals in February 2021 resulted in the upgrading of the Joint FAO/IAEA Nuclear Technologies Division to become the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. Major joint achievements have since been made in the sustainable intensification of agricultural production and food security through the application of nuclear and related techniques, technology transfer and capacity building in member countries. Grossi expressed his appreciation for this and also desire to intensify cooperation on the Zoonotic Disease Integrated Action (ZODIAC) initiative – which is complementary to the One Health approach.

Qu emphasized that FAO has a keen interest in strengthening innovative research and development activities in the field of nuclear science, including through the FAO/IAEA Agriculture and Biotechnology Laboratories in Seibersdorf, near Vienna. He expresses appreciation for IAEA’s support for improving the capacity and infrastructure of the Laboratories. The second project to Renovate the Nuclear Application Laboratories will complete the modernization phase, with a new laboratory building and a greenhouse for plant breeding and genetics. Grossi invited the FAO Director-General to jointly inaugurate the facility next year.

The FAO Director-General in turn extended an invitation to Grossi to visit FAO Headquarters to participate in the Science and Innovation Forum. The FAO Science and Innovation Forum will be organized together with the World Food Forum (WFF) and Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum in the week of 17 October 2022. 

Science, technology and innovation serve as a foundation for FAO’s Strategic Framework 2022-31, and FAO’s first-ever Science and Innovation Strategy, endorsed by the FAO Council in June 2022, includes mention of the strides made in areas such as nuclear techniques.