Preface

In November 1999, the FAO Conference approved The Strategic Framework for FAO: 2000-2015, the Organization's first truly long-term statement of its core strategic objectives. The new Strategic Framework is intended to strengthen strategic management, with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and partnership, and to shape FAO's course in the years ahead. It results from two years of global consultations with FAO's Members, partners and Secretariat staff, and also encapsulates the results to date of the major organizational reform process that FAO has been undertaking since the early 1990s.

Taking FAO's mandate as its point of departure, the Strategic Framework focuses clearly on the commitment, made by world leaders at the 1996 World Food Summit, to halve the number of undernourished people in the world by no later than 2015.

This booklet summarizes the full version of The Strategic Framework for FAO: 2000-2015 to provide a readily accessible reference tool for governmental, technical and professional audiences involved with FAO's work around the world. It consists of three parts:

1. Overall strategic framework, which describes the predicted global scenario as well as specific external factors that will have a bearing on FAO's work over the next 15 years, and states the three main goals of Members, noting their consistency with FAO's purpose.



2. Corporate strategies, which covers five major strategies¹, encompassing 12 related objectives,² to address Members' medium- to long-term needs; and six strategies to address cross-organizational issues.



3. Implementation programme, which describes how the Strategic Framework fits into FAO's programme-budget process and defines the criteria for priority setting, including a further definition of the areas in which FAO has a comparative advantage.

¹ A, B, C, D, E.

² A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, etc.