Brasília – The new director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, who was sworn in last Sunday (1st), intends to boost food security through increased support to poorer, food-deficit countries, especially those plagued by lasting crises.
“We will create teams that draw together the Organization’s skills in policy advice, investment planning, resource mobilization, emergency response and sustainable development,” said Graziano according to a FAO statement.
According to him, the eradication of hunger must not be separated from other global challenges, such as reviving national economies, protecting natural resources from degradation and adapting to climate change.
The statement stresses that approximately 925 million people suffer from chronic hunger and many countries are far from achieving the first Millennium Development Goal, namely to halve the proportion of people living in hunger and extreme poverty by 2015, based on 1990 statistics.
Throughout his campaign for the position, Graziano championed the following issues, which he restated during his swearing in ceremony: hunger eradication, sustainable food production and consumption, fairer global food management, the completion of the FAO’s organization reform to improve efficiency, transparency and accountability, and expansion of partnerships and South-South cooperation.
Graziano is the eighth FAO director-general, following the Senegalese Jacques Diouf, who remained in the position from 1994 to 2011. The new director-general will give his first press conference next Tuesday (3rd). He was Brazilian minister of Food Security during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term in office as president, when the federal hunger eradication program Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) was implemented. From 2006 to 2011 he was FAO’s assistant director-general and regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Chile.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
