IICA asked to lead in lifting the profile of agriculture in the Americas

Having resolved to raise the profile of the agriculture sector in global climate change discussions, the ministers and secretaries of Agriculture of the Americas asked the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) to coordinate the process. The aim is to highlight the benefits of greater climate action for ensuring food and nutritional security, sustainability, as well as water conservation and management.

A release from IICA said approximately 20 ministers and secretaries, along with high-level authorities, representing 32 countries, gathered at the Meeting of the Americas on Climate Change and Agriculture, and approved a declaration entitled “On the Road to the 2022 Summit of the Americas and Beyond”.
The Declaration stated that current global conditions have heightened awareness about the fragility of global food and nutritional security and there’s need to boost sustainable agricultural production, particularly in view of growing climate risks.

The ministerial meeting was held in the lead-up to the Summit of the Americas, which will bring together heads of state and government from the region next week in Los Angeles.

The participating ministers and secretaries agreed that the current scenario of multiple crises—the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Europe and climate change—poses a threat to food security. In the declaration, they expressed the need for support and international technical cooperation, through IICA.

IICA was also tasked with preparing messages on behalf of the ministers and secretaries of Agriculture, to be presented prior to the Conference of the Parties 27 (COP27) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Egypt. The messages will be based on the regional consensus achieved on the road to the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021.

On that occasion, the hemisphere presented a unified position—arrived at through extensive debates coordinated by IICA—that indicated that farmers and food system workers are a vital and central link and that without agricultural production there would be no raw materials to prepare food.

It was agreed that the messages to be presented at COP27 would be approved at a ministerial conference slated for September, where an appeal would also be made for greater public and private support for innovation, financing and capacity development to boost the resilience of production to climate change.