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FAO and Mississippi State University (MSU) will step up cooperation on FAO’s new Global Aquaculture Advancement Partnership (GAAP) programme and FAO’s Emergency Preparedness and Response (EMPRES) programme to improve the capacity of developing countries in fish health and aquaculture.  FAO Deputy Director-General Daniel Gustafson and the President of the Mississippi State University (MSU), Mark Keenum, signed a joint declaration in the presence of FAO’s Director of the Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development (OPC), Marcela Villarreal. This joint declaration strenghthens the existing Memorandum of Understanding signed by the two organizations in 2010 and paves the way for cooperation in specific...

The  global campaign against hunger launched by the Caritas confederation is an important contribution to raise awareness of the plight of millions of hungry people around the globe and to work towards the elimination of hunger, said Marcela Villarreal, Director of FAO's Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development. The campaign ‘One Human Family, Food for All’ was launched in Rome with a video message of Pope Francis. In his message, the Pope said that “We are facing a global scandal of around one billion people who still suffer from hunger today. We cannot look the other way. The food that...

Each year, the world loses or squanders a third of the food it produces. This means that somewhere between planting seeds in fields and providing nourishment to the world’s 7 billion people, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food with a value of more than US$1 trillion is lost or wasted. These numbers are simply untenable in a world where, according to FAO, some 870 million people do not have enough to eat. In fact, according to the FAO-commissioned study that tallied these numbers, if just onefourth of lost or wasted food were saved, it could end global hunger. When...

In the first decade of this century, the developing world dealt with an unprecedented level of large-scale land acquisition by international speculators and global agribusinesses, mainly in Africa. Other, related issues included corruption in natural resource administration, conflicting claims over natural resources, and lack of recognition of customary tenure systems. This focused global attention on the need for more responsible governance of tenure. It was against this backdrop that more than a thousand experts from governments, academia, civil society organizations (CSOs) and the private sector, representing 133 countries, participated in a series of consultations, workshops, drafting committees and intergovernmental...

Civil society and FAO agreed on improved space for dialogue and enhanced mechanisms to foster both closer partnerships and wider balanced representation in pursuit of the shared goal for eradicating hunger, poverty and malnutrition in Asia and the Pacific. Despite important progress obtained over the years, today’s world continues to face serious problems of poverty, hunger and malnutrition. CSOs play a crucial role in food security and poverty reduction is several areas: from policy dialogue and discussions on substantive matters to programme and project design and implementation. A CSO/FAO consultation in Bangkok on 20 and 21...