18 October 2019, Rome – FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu today said he hopes the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) will have a “beautiful story” to tell in the coming years as the multistakeholder platform tackles an ambitious plan to work towards food security and nutrition for all.
“I’m supporting you – in action, not just talking,” the Director-General said in remarks at the closing session of the week-long CFS meeting in Rome.
CFS is the most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders – including civil society and the private sector – to collaborate towards common goals in areas relating to food, nutrition, farming and rural development. The latest session – the 46th – achieved record attendance.
“If you are more inclusive, you are more productive,” Qu said, noting that CFS must focus their efforts to deliver tangible results for farmers and other people living in a wide variety of different conditions.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Programme support, along with FAO, the CFS Secretariat.
CFS appoints a new chair and other 46th session highlights
The 46th session of the CFS appointed a new chair, Thanawat Tiensin, a trained veterinarian and livestock expert who has been serving as the Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of Thailand to the Rome-based U.N. agencies. Tiensin replaces Mario Arvelo, who presided over this week’s agenda.
Earlier in the week, the United Arab Emirates pledged to continue to provide financial support to the CFS to help achieve its first-ever Multi-Year Programme of Work for 2020-2023, which was approved on Thursday.
The programme provides a comprehensive framework for accelerating progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating hunger by 2030. It prioritizes thematic workstreams linked to food systems and nutrition, agroecology and other innovative approaches, gender equality and women’s empowerment in the context of food security and nutrition and promoting youth engagement and employment in agriculture and food systems.
Delegates also made progress with CFS’s ongoing work to develop Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition for next year’s session.
“I’m expecting that the work of CFS will be more relevant than ever,” Tiensin said.
