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Add to Preferred SourcesIf we want to shift towards healthy and sustainable food systems and build back better after the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to re-connect agriculture with ecosystem services and unleash biodiversity’s full potential to enhance our food and agriculture production, the participants of a high-level panel discussion, co-organized by FAO and the European Union.
The virtual discussion entitled “The European Green Deal: A Conversation on the Transformative Force of the EU Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies to build Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems” focused on ways to strengthen the FAO-EU collaboration on addressing challenges to sustainably manage biodiversity across all agricultural sectors.
“Biodiversity is vital to improving agricultural and food production and maintaining our planet’s resources and ecosystems,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu, calling for more to be done to prevent the biodiversity loss undermining the resilience of many agricultural systems and posing a serious threat to global food security.
In his opening remarks Qu noted that achieving sustainability at a global scale requires more than just technical and digital solutions. “It involves key policy decisions, and in this regard, the EU just made a big step,” the FAO Director-General said referring to the recently adopted European Green Deal.
To this end, he noted that the implementation of these important decisions in the field requires strong collaborative efforts between the environment and agriculture sectors.
In recent years, FAO has made significant progress on integrating biodiversity in all agricultural policies.
Last year, it launched its flagship report on the State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. The report highlights the need to protect natural resources, including biodiversity, and the need to conserve and use genetic resources to increase productivity.
FAO developed a range of biodiversity-related tools and guidance across sectors, including an International Code of Conduct for the Sustainable Use and Management of Fertilizers and the Ten Elements of Agroecology.
Original source: FAO
Published on 23 June 2020