Add us as your preferred source on Google to see more of our content in Search.
Add to Preferred SourcesFAO and Germany celebrated 15 years of successful collaboration today, hailing the more than $129 million (EUR115 million) in special funds channeled to food security, right-to-food initiatives and nutrition programmes around the world through the government’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) and FAO’s Bilateral Trust Fund (BTF).
The special vehicle has engaged in more than 100 projects in more than 50 countries since it was established in 2002 on the back of a successful project to strengthen information systems for food and nutrition security in Afghanistan. Designed to catalyze broader actions, it has widened in thematic and geographic scope ever since, supporting countries to obtain concrete results within their development goals.
“We need to rely on strong and lasting partnerships to achieve sustainable development, and the Bilateral Trust Fund between FAO and Germany is a good example of this,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva at a special event held on the sidelines of the annual FAO Conference.
The event, showcased a dairy project in Afghanistan along with a nutrition programme in Kenya that serves as a beacon for work the Bilateral Trust Fund supports across sub-Saharan Africa in hopes of encouraging larger-scale adoption and investment. Several BTF-initiated projects were later expanded with additional financial support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Italy and the World Bank.
Looking forward, the fund will now formally add migration and the nutritional relevance of soil conditions to its thematic focuses.
“Making a concrete contribution to realising the right to food and the access to land is and remains the fund’s overriding aim. The idea behind the fund was and still is the development of concepts by means of beacon projects that are then intended to be picked up on by financially stronger donors,” Christian Schmidt, Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture.
Germany’s suite of actions
On top of its annual $30 million assessed contribution as a Member of FAO and its voluntary contributions to the work of FAO, Graziano da Silva noted that Germany is also a “major strategic partner” to FAO , as the government advocates for key themes such as food security and responsible investments in agriculture at major international fora such as the G8 and G20 summits.
Source: FAO. Read full information.
5 July, 2017