Vienna, 26 November - The UNIDO Director General met with FAO Director-General QU Dongyu on 26 November, which marked DG QU’s first visit to UNIDO Headquarters in Vienna.

The Director General welcomed the FAO Director-General and expressed his appreciation of the close cooperation between UNIDO and FAO. Director General Müller praised the technical support which FAO provided to UNIDO’s „World Without Hunger“ conference which took place in Ethiopia earlier this month. The joint UNIDO-FAO publication “Ending hunger is possible: An income-generating approach through value addition” which was presented on the first day of the conference, outlines the cost of ending hunger, as well as concrete action areas for ending hunger by focusing on raising the incomes of the poorest in the world and increasing local value addition in the agri-food sector.

Director General Müller lauded the resent launch of the China-Africa-UNIDO Center of Excellence in Ethiopia, designed to promote sustainable industrialization, boost agricultural modernization, and advance skills development across the African continent. FAO Director General QU highlighted that UNIDO’s strength is in advancing food processing, technology, and industrialization, and encouraged Director General Müller to consider developing jointly an Action Plan for Africa, to leverage the power of South-South and triangular cooperation using the technical expertise of both organizations. Both Directors General agreed to continue collaborating closely on key priorities in support of the transformation of agrifood systems and the food-water-energy ecosystem nexus.

UNIDO-FAO Cooperation

Earlier this year, the two organizations conducted their first annual review of the UNIDO-FAO Partnership Action Plan, which stems from a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which was signed between the two organizations in October 2022.  Important milestones have already been reached in agri-food systems transformation, particularly through the joint UNIDO-FAO Agrifood Systems Transformation Accelerator (ASTA), with Jordan being the latest country added to the accelerator’s portfolio. ASTA has also established a productive partnership with FAO’s One Country, One Priority Product (OCOP) programme, which covers Lesotho, Malawi, Moldova and Tajikistan.

Further new joint projects in the area of agribusiness are currently being implemented in Liberia, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, and the two organizations are planning to expand their joint agribusiness work to other countries. Food safety is another ongoing area of cooperation together with the Joint FAO/International Atomic Energy Agency Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture.  Moreover, the two organizations have worked together on the International Vienna Energy and Climate Forum, focusing on food systems, and in the context of the Global Bioenergy Partnership, and the Green Cities Initiative in Africa and Latin America. Further areas of cooperation under the UNIDO-FAO Partnership Action Plan are clean cooking initiatives in Africa, urban food systems, urban farming and bioeconomy approaches.

Also, the UNIDO Innovation Lab and FAO’s World Food Forum (WFF) have joined forces this year to launch a Food Loss Award, a new category within the WFF Startup Innovation Awards. This initiative aims to identify and empower promising startups developing innovative solutions to tackle food loss, a critical challenge within the global agrifood system.