Read-out of the bilateral meeting between FAO Director-General QU Dongyu and Carlos María Correa, Executive Director of the South Centre

11 April 2021, Rome - FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, and Carlos María Correa, the Executive Director of the South Centre, had a virtual meeting today to discuss bilateral collaboration.

The Executive Director of the South Centre briefed the Director-General on the Center's current activities in support of developing countries. He noted that the Centre focuses on three main pillars: policy oriented-research, supporting developing countries in multilateral negotiations and providing training and capacity building in a wide range of areas. These include climate change, agriculture and sustainable natural resources management, social development, as well as biodiversity and genetic resources benefit-sharing.

The FAO Director-General stressed the importance of focusing on the complementarity between FAO and the South Centre.

He highlighted the need to agree on concrete action areas that can support the objectives of the members of the two organizations - including through mainstreaming South-South and Triangular cooperation approaches, collaboration on climate change to build forward better while recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, capacity building for good management of Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and intellectual property rights protection.

Both parties agreed to include concrete action areas in the new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will focus on capacity building at the national level, advocacy, joint publications, and research.

The discussion will be continued at the technical level to refine the scope of strengthened collaboration, including the eventual renewal of the MoU in November 2021.