Government, UN and development partners attended FAO's programming meeting

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) held a programming meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday (31/03 & 01/04.) to discuss the Organization's projects in Mozambique. The country's technical staff and representatives from the Government, other UN agencies and 14 development partners attended the conference.

In the opening session, FAO's Representative in Mozambique, Castro Camarada, mentioned the need to focus the Organization's interventions on relevant activities which help achieve the strategic objectives "in a timely, good and efficient manner".

The importance of the integration of nutrition issues, namely nutrition education, into all FAO programmes was one of the dominant subjects of the gathering. On this, Joyce Mulila Mitti mentioned the Farmer Field School (FFS) methodology as "a vehicle not only to address technology transfer but also aspects that aim to improve the quality of life of whole communities, such as nutrition". Mitti, who is the plant production and protection officer at the FAO Subregional Office for Southern Africa, said she has seen "satisfactory progress towards achieving more productivity and food and nutrition security in Mozambique" although challenges still persist in strengthening the FFSs.

Family farming was also among the debated themes in the meeting. This is an area in which FAO already works with the Government of Austria and other developing partners who support the agrarian sector and which, according to the Representative of the Austrian embassy, Eva Kohl, "should be strengthened and broadened".

Thematic areas that shall get more prominence in possible future interventions are, among others, the resilience strengthening in arid and semi-arid zones, small-scale agro-processing, the promotion of a closer link between agriculture and nutrition and the search for resources for the implementation of the Agricultural Statistics Master Plan.