In Argentina, within the framework of the Meeting of Ministers, the Inter-American Board of Agriculture (IABA) will be electing the Director General of IICA for the period 2014-2018.
Buenos Aires, September 20, 2013 (IICA). The Meeting of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas 2013, which will be taking place next week in Argentina, will be a defining moment in the efforts to boost the capabilities of the region’s agricultural sector by promoting the sustainable use of water. The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) will be proposing a hemispheric agenda to the ministers designed to achieve that goal.
The meeting, from September 24-27, will be held in Campana, in the province of Buenos Aires. The ministers will also be meeting as the Inter-American Board of Agriculture (IABA), which will elect the Director General of IICA for the next four years.
The meeting will be a groundbreaking event. For the first time, the ministers of agriculture of the entire hemisphere will be discussing and negotiating actions to strengthen the participation of their ministries in the integrated management of the region’s water resources, a task in which agriculture has a key role to play.
The activity will be inaugurated by Norberto Yauhar, Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries of Argentina, and Víctor M. Villalobos, Director General of IICA. The Argentine government is organizing the meeting with the Institute’s support.
The importance of protecting the indissoluble link that exists between water and agriculture will be the clarion call of the keynote address by Gertjan Beekman, an international specialist in planning, development and management of water resources.
The subject will be discussed in depth by the ministers in a forum in which the principal challenges in relation to water and agriculture in the Americas will be presented, and actions will be recommended to ensure that the agricultural sector has sufficient water to produce the food, energy and fibers that humankind requires.
Those actions should range from institution building to the modernization of innovation systems, both of which are included in the hemispheric cooperation agenda that IICA will propose to the Ministers, who will be able to draw on the Institute’s technical experience, acquired during more than 70 years at the service of agriculture in the Americas, to implement it.
The speakers in the forum will include experts from IICA, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Agrifood Technology Institute of Catalonia (IRTA), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the National Agricultural Technology Institute of Argentina (INTA).
The fifth annual report on the outlook for agriculture and rural development in the Americas, which IICA, FAO and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) produce together, will also be unveiled at the meeting.
This year, the document contains a special chapter on the situation of family farmers in the hemisphere, highlighting the challenges facing these producers and opportunities for them to contribute to food security in the region.
Decisions will also be taken during the meeting aimed at strengthening the technical cooperation that IICA provides to its 34 member countries. With this objective in mind, the Ministers of Agriculture–meeting as the IABA–will elect the Director General of the Institute of the period 2014-2018.
The Director General, Víctor M. Villalobos, has been nominated by Mexico (the country of which he is a citizen) to continue at the helm of IICA for a second term.
The meeting is scheduled to conclude on September 26. The ministers will be adopting a declaration in which they are expected to pledge to implement projects designed to improve the sustainable management of water in agriculture throughout the region.
For more information, contact:
patricia.leon@iica.int
pconsig@minagri.gob.ar
