Revisiting Jordan’s Agriculture Strategy to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Location

Amman, Jordan

Agriculture development is a strategic tool to reduce poverty and food insecurity, increase employment in remote areas, and improve natural resources’ efficiency and productivity. Supporting smallholders to enhance their access to markets, to improve their skills, and to increase their production/productivity while protecting the environment (soil, water, air, and biodiversity) is core to achieve specific SDGs’ targets. Mainstreaming SDGs into national policies requires designing institutional based and process-oriented frameworks that help stakeholders to define gaps and prioritize actions to achieve a positive change right across the 2030 Agenda. Population increase scare natural resources, and low resiliency of agriculture systems urge policy makers to adapt production systems and design context-based strategies to improve food security and promote local economic development.
Jordan, with extremely limited natural resources, faces enormous challenges in achieving a progress in SDGs’ related to sustainable agriculture and food security. The Ministry of Agriculture is in the process of revising its agriculture strategy to prioritize its contribution to achieve specific SDGs’ targets. The Ministry planned to validate a primary list of selected targets in order to mainstream them into the strategy. Bringing stakeholders together helps in developing targeted programs and policies with shared inclusive responsibilities, in connecting various SDGs and targets under specific themes, in measuring and monitoring progress in targets through a unified approach, and in mitigating policy and implementation constraints to enable a positive change.
Within this context, The Jordanian Ministry of Agriculture and ESCWA are organizing a capacity building workshop on 3-4 March 2020 in Amman, Jordan. The aim of this workshop is to provide guidance on mainstreaming SDGs into Jordan’s national agriculture and food security policies based on the theoretical and empirical overview of main stakeholders. The workshop will inform the revision of the strategy under specific themes and structure the way the Ministry of Agriculture will approach core challenges.
The main objectives of the workshop include agreeing on a final list of SDGs’ targets that the Ministry of Agriculture will work to achieve by 2025 within the timeframe of the current strategy (2016-2025), developing the capacity of government officials in planning, mainstreaming, and localizing SDGs related to agriculture and food security and discussing the challenges of agriculture marketing and scaling-up innovative production technologies in Jordan and propose context-based recommendations that the Ministry of Agriculture can take to facilitate and tailor the support under both pillars, etc.