Guyana will host the next United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Regional Conference in 2024 after agriculture ministers from Latin America and the Caribbean agreed on the regional priorities that will guide the work of the FAO in the region for the next two years.
“Latin America and the Caribbean can and must face its challenges and move to the forefront of global food and agriculture. The world’s food security requires it,” said FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, adding “the best way to do this is by transforming their agri-food systems to be more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable,” he added.
“I am pleased to say that this regional conference ends with great success. You have clearly laid out your regional roadmap to move towards this great transformation in the three regional priorities you have endorsed,” QU said.
Qu’s statement followed last week’s five-day FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, which was attended by 586 persons, including members of the private sector, academia, civil society, and the United Nations system, and more than 34,000 others followed the broadcasts.
The meeting agreed on building sustainable agri-food systems to ensure healthy diets as one of the priorities and the FAO will help countries ensure physical and economic access to safe and nutritious food, promote healthy diets, and policies and programs to support the 104 million people living with obesity and the 60 million people living with hunger.
“In Latin America and the Caribbean, there is no hunger due to lack of food. There is no hunger because farmers don’t do their work. There is hunger because there is too much inequality and poverty,” said FAO’s regional representative, Julio Berdegué.
The second regional priority of the FAO is prosperous and inclusive rural societies with Berdegué noting that “half of the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean is poor, one in four people live in extreme poverty, and 82 per cent of those who work in agriculture and fishing do so in informal conditions”.
He said agriculture that is resilient and adapted to climate change is the FAO’s third regional priority.
“We are strongly committed to stopping deforestation, promoting sustainable and low-emission livestock farming, and promoting the recarbonization of soils and the recovery of degraded agroecosystems,” said Berdegué.
According to the FAO regional representative, all three regional priorities have a precondition: innovation.
“Our commitment is that each FAO regional initiative become a motor of innovations, and that evert project should be a digitization experience. The digitization of agri-food systems and rural societies is absolutely necessary,” said Berdegué.
The FAO said innovation is central to its Strategic Framework 2022-2031 that seeks to promote better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life, leaving no one behind, and was analyzed by the countries during the five-day conference to adapt it to their needs and conditions.
The FAO regional conference being hosted in Guyana is perfectly timed as the country is current pursuing innovative means to take control of their own food security.
Guyana’s president Dr. Irfaan Ali recently announced that the country planned on exploring the possibility of sourcing a variety of wheat for local production. The surge in the prices of wheat and other commodity is a result of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine which both account for about 30 percent of the world’s traded wheat.
“We have started to present leadership on our next big crisis, food security…. The world has taught us that we can no longer be dependent, we have to be as self-sufficient and self-sustainable as possible, especially when it comes to the supply of food and basic commodities,” he noted.
CMC/
 Regional Conference in 2024){kind=link}