APEC calls for efforts to ensure food security
The Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) with the theme "Policy Partnership on Food Security" (PPFS) took place on January 25-26 in Jakarta (Indonesia).
PPFS is part of the SOM-APEC meetings and related meetings organized by host country Indonesia to prepare for the APEC Summit, which will be held in October this year in Bali. PPFS is attended by senior agricultural officials from 21 APEC member economies and representatives of many relevant regional and international organizations.
(Source: bisnis.com)
The conference focused on exchanging and discussing issues related to food security in order to seek and develop specific policies and action plans for each member country in particular and APEC in general, to be implemented in 2013 and until 2020, with the goal of achieving food security throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
PPFS emphasized the importance of self-sufficiency and self-reliance in food, as well as the common challenges that the APEC agricultural sector in particular and the world in general are facing such as global warming, increasingly severe weather, increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, unpredictable impacts of climate change, limited and gradually shrinking natural resources, prices on the world market continuing to fluctuate at high levels until 2020 according to the forecast of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), high production costs due to the industrialization of food...
Speaking at the conference, Indonesian Agriculture Minister Suswono emphasized the need to increase farmers' participation in ensuring food security, in which small-scale farmers need to participate and connect as well as need to be supported and facilitated to participate and connect in the food supply chain, on the one hand allowing them to increase their income, enjoy more financial benefits from the continuous development of the economy, and on the other hand contribute more effectively to ensuring food security.
Sharing the above views, delegates attending the PPFS Conference also agreed that globalization and advances in information technology have opened up many opportunities, but at the same time also created difficulties, as it eliminated boundaries between countries, creating market opportunities both domestically and internationally, including opportunities for exporting many products produced by smallholder farmers.
However, globalization and international trade sometimes favor large corporations over smallholder farmers. Therefore, APEC needs to build a policy partnership to strengthen and facilitate food sovereignty, access to land, advanced technologies and better varieties for production for smallholder farmers in the Asia-Pacific region, as they are the largest investors in agriculture and food production.
According to the FAO, APEC economies are currently among the world's largest food exporters and importers, accounting for 34% of global agricultural exports and 36% of imports in 2009. On the supply side, agriculture in emerging economies in Asia-Pacific is still largely dependent on smallholder farmers who manage small farming areas.
PPFS is a high-level consultative forum, established in 2011 to facilitate investment, trade liberalization and support sustainable development in the agricultural sector, with the aim of creating a food system by 2020 to ensure food security across the Asia-Pacific region./.
According to (TTXVN) - DT
