Regional Meeting on Promoting Food and Water Security in the Arab Region

ESCWA has implemented since 2015 an initiative on promoting food and water security in the Arab region with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and in partnership with FAO-RNE, the Arab Organization for Agriculture Development (AOAD) and the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD). This initiative was designed to enable policy makers address challenges related to food security and climate change within the framework of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and related Arab strategies and initiatives. The initiative examined food and water security through an integrated lens within a regional context that considers the needs of the population within a natural resource scarce environment.

By end of 2019, the main achievements of the initiative included the availability of a diverse and rich knowledge outcomes to inform policy makers, enhance technical capacity on assessing climate change impacts on strategic agricultural crops, adopt and use of a common regional framework to monitor the status of food security, promote the application and adoption of good agricultural practices at national level, and encourage an improved coordination of policies and programmes across water and agricultural ministries through regional and national institutional mechanisms.

In this respect ESCWA  is organizing a regional meeting on “Promoting Food and Water Security in the Arab Region” with partners to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to promoting food and water security through cooperation and coordination of policies. The regional meeting is to be held during 27-28 November 2019 at the Kempinski Hotel in Amman, Jordan.