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Interview: FAO cheif lauds cooperation with China on food security, poverty reduction

Xinhua, March 5, 2016 Adjust font size:

The director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Thursday that the collaboration between FAO and China has provided more support for food security, poverty reduction and sustainable agriculture in the last three years.

"We have had a cooperation program with China for many years, but it has grown greatly over the last three years. It is above all a South-South cooperation, focused on Africa as well as some other countries in Asia," Jose Graziano da Silva said in an interview with Xinhua, during the 34th FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Graziano da Silva lauded the importance of South-South cooperation in helping meet countries' development goals. FAO has a wide range of development programs based on South-South Cooperation, a mechanism which seeks to gather knowledge and resources to build up capacity among countries in the global South.

"This cooperation is essentially a triangular collaboration where Chinese experts attend to needs which FAO identifies in certain countries, especially in areas such as veterinary care, agronomy and fishing," said the director-general.

Graziano da Silva added that the partnership between FAO and China has also expanded to new areas, such as irrigation, which he called "an ever more important subject."

Therefore, FAO has recently designated five institutions in China as training and research centers for their cooperation. Besides, China has tabled a proposal with FAO to link these five centers with 21 demonstration centers across Africa.

China has established within FAO a fiduciary fund worth 30 million U.S. dollars to facilitate South-South cooperation, particularly technical development, knowledge transfer and political discussion among various developing economies.

Furthermore, during the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit held in New York in September 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered to contribute 2 billion dollars to fund South-South cooperation and help developing countries fulfill their post-2015 development agenda.

The Chinese president has said that he wants China to invest at least 12 billion dollars by 2030 in the world's least developed economies. Endi