Voices from Small Island Developing States including the Pacific and the Caribbean will be heard at the High Level Panel on Global Conference on Building Resilience to Food and Nutrition Security which begins today in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The Director for the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), Michael Hailu told PACNEWS the conference is an opportunity for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to share their experiences and challenges at the meeting.
Hailu said its high time issues concerning SIDS are raised in international meetings like this. He is delighted that the Caribbean and the Pacific are represented.
“Well this is a major conference on Building Resilience to Food and Nutrition Security that brings together about 850 experts from around the world. CTA in partnership with the European Union and the ACP group decided to bring together participants from the Caribbean and the Pacific so that they can contribute to the global discussion on building resilience and also learn from experiences from other regions.
“What we found out that generally most of the Caribbean and Pacific experts are not included in such international discussions and we thought that it would be useful for them to be part of this discussion. As part of this conference we are also organising a side event just to focus on Caribbean and Pacific and facilitate exchanges of lessons between the two regions. There are people coming from the private sectors, farmers organisation, regional institutions and other groups so they can share challenges, especially challenges of resilience in each of these of each regions and what practical solutions that have worked for them that they can share with other regions,” Hailu told PACNEWS in Addis Ababa.
Hailu also explained that outcomes of the discussion will be fed to the upcoming SIDS conference in Samoa in September.
“As you know every 10 years there is a major UN conference on Small Developing Islands States (SIDS) and the next one will be in September in Samoa. We are hoping that some of the discussions that will take place this week will contribute to the discussion in terms of the post 2015 agenda as well as in terms of building resilience to food and nutrition security in small island states.
CTA is working very closely with the UN body responsible for this meeting and the Secretary General for SIDS is also coming to our meeting and will be contributing with the discussion. He will be listening to some of the issues that will be coming out of our discussions. We hope whatever that is come out in this meeting will be fed into the SIDS meeting in Samoa,” explained Hailu.
The conference will end on Saturday.
