The Commission, at its Eleventh Regular Session in 2007, adopted its Multi-Year Programme of Work, a rolling 10-year work plan covering the totality of biodiversity for food and agriculture, including plant, animal, forest, aquatic, micro-organism and invertebrate genetic resources. In addition, the Multi-Year Programme of Work covers a whole range of cross-sectoral matters relevant to several or all components of biodiversity for food and agriculture. The Multi-Year Programme of Work, as amended by the Commission at its Thirteenth Regular Session in 2011, lays out the major outputs and milestones the Commission aims to achieve between 2013 and 2021.
The Multi-Year Programme of Work:
- enables the Commission to implement its multidisciplinary mandate through a planned and staged approach;
- serves as a planning tool for its Members to improve national policy coordination and mid-term planning of activities;
- provides a vehicle to strengthen international cooperation with all actors, from research to farmers organizations, involved in the conservation and use of biodiversity for food and agriculture;
- facilitates cooperation with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, particularly with regard to the supporting components of the Treaty that are overseen by the Commission;
- helps the Commission to plan cooperation with the Convention on Biological Diversity in order to support joint implementation of their respective programmes of work; and
- allows the Commission to advise FAO systematically on the full range of its activities on biodiversity for food and agriculture, and on the priorities to be accorded to such work in FAO’s Programme of Work and Budget.
The Commission, at its Twelfth Regular Session, adopted the Strategic Plan 2010-2017 for the implementation of the Multi-Year Programme of Work, identifying processes and cooperation needed to achieve the agreed outputs and milestones.
The Commission decided to keep the Multi-Year Programme of Work and its Strategic Plan under continuous review. The Multi-Year Programme of Work foresees progress reports and periodic reviews at the Commission’s Fifteenth and Seventeenth Regular Sessions.
The Multi-Year Programme of Work foresees, inter alia, the presentation of the first ever State of the World's Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture at its Sixteenth Regular Session (2017).
