Welcome to our first edition of 2018.
We are very pleased to share with you our first newsletter of 2018, a year that promises to be rather exciting for all of us working at IICA.
On January 15, Dr. Manuel Otero was sworn in as the 11th Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), marking the beginning of a new era for the Institute. This is a time of renewed visions, dreams, commitments and goals.
During his inaugural speech, Dr. Otero shared his vision for IICA, the agriculture of the Americas and the way in which countries could collaborate to make our region more important in the fight against food insecurity, environmental degradation and poverty. In his speech, he clearly indicated that “… IICA has the duty and responsibility to demonstrate that agriculture is, above all, an integral part for the solutions of the menaces we face….” , and defined the route and work that we must undertake if we want to really transform agriculture in our Hemisphere and to make IICA a more relevant institution.
As part of his commitment to achieve a real transformation of our Institute, Dr. Otero embarked on a trip to visit the United States, Canada and Mexico, where he met with high-level authorities, members of the international community from organizations, financial and donor institutions and the private sector. His message was clear and simple, we need to work together to make agriculture a new engine of development, transforming the vision from a purely extractive activity to an activity based on the use of knowledge, value added and the new bio-economy. This newsletter contains a short summary of Dr. Otero´s meeting in the USA.
The first two months of 2018 have been of incredible international activity, where the issues of trade appear at the center stage of the news. For agriculture in the USA, it is clear that trade is one of the top priorities, which has been expressed by several high officials of the Department of Agriculture. Trade is and will continue to be essential for the wellbeing of farmers in the country.
As in other occasions, I would like to thank you for the support you have provided to this IICA Delegation and to the work of our Institute across the Americas. I hope we can continue to find ways to collaborate in benefit of agricultural producers across the world.
Sincerely,
Dr. Miguel García-Winder, IICA Representative in the USA
*The opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors and they do not reflect the position of the Institute on the topics presented.
*This post appears in the IICA Delegation in the USA Newsletter – January – February 2018
