Year-End Message from the FAOLOR Director

Dear Readers, Colleagues and Friends,

Summing up the outgoing year 2020 is not an easy task as it was very different from the chain of the years that preceded it – happy and not so, brighter or gloomier but still incomparable to what we have witnessed in the last twelve months. 

The humanity rose to the unprecedented challenge the COVID-19 posed to its very existence, probably the largest and most dramatic since the end of WWII three quarters of a century ago. Hundreds of millions of people in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, food production and distribution, in the fields and on the farms worked relentlessly to feed the world despite all the hardships and barriers that suddenly emerged on the way of labor and commodity flows. 

Adequate nutrition is vital to maintaining people’s defenses against any disease, coronaviruses included, and FAO that marked its 75th anniversary in 2020 did its best to support its 194 Member States in maintaining the stability of food systems. These efforts were aimed at curbing the growth of hunger that threatened to add another 132 million to the world’s already 680 million hungry. 

Today, we celebrate everyone at the “food front”, both food heroes and ordinary farmers and workers, men and women who labored inexorably to provide all of us with “daily bread”. 

We celebrate our sister organization, the World Food Programme, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 as recognition of its contribution, together with all Rome-based UN Agencies and other UN humanitarian programmes, to bringing emergency food supplies to the people suffering from food crises all over the world. 

FAO is firm in its intent to build on a positive agenda in the coming year that will witness a UN Food Systems Summit and decisive steps in accelerating progress towards the 2030 Agenda goals and targets including the paramount goal of eliminating hunger. 

The FAO Liaison Office with the Russian Federation thanks warmly all our Russian partners for their support of FAO’s mission and our joint endeavor to achieve a hunger-free-world. 

I firmly believe that there inevitable should, can and will be a light at the end of COVID-19 tunnel, and I am confident that the humanity will come out of this pandemic stronger and more united than ever. 

I wish all of you, your families and kin sound health, excellent holidays and a good start to 2021 and hope that next December we will have every reason to say “It was a very good year!”  

Oleg Kobiakov

Director, FAOLOR