FAO Director-General calls for a collective and collaborative approach to face COVID-19

8 April 2020, Rome – The COVID-19 pandemic “affects everyone in every country, rich and poor” and tackling it requires planning ahead to anticipate the problems it causes as well as robust international cooperation, FAO Director-General (DG) QU Dongyu said today in the first virtual conference in FAO’s history with its Members’ Permanent Representatives.

Governance, planning and communication have been the pillars of FAO’s Crisis Prevention Management, which aims to ensure the health and wellbeing of staff and the delivery of the Organization’s mandate. “Right from the beginning in February, I put in place an internal structure to monitor, plan and manage FAO’s response to the crisis. Thanks to that FAO is ahead of the curve,” QU said.

A Crisis Management Team oversees all aspects of FAO’s affected services as well as the implementation of the Organization’s Business Continuity Plans. “We are working hard to maintain our productivity,” the Director-General said. This includes the implementation of a modern communication policy geared towards the different stakeholders as well as effective and efficient staff teleworking.

QU also highlighted the vital role FAO is playing within the UN system and beyond in the current crisis, by sharing its expertise and technical knowledge in relation to food production, processing and value chains.

The Director-General then shared FAO’s perspective on the pandemic’s impact on food security. He highlighted that FAO’s main concerns were related to the improving of the resilience of agricultural production and protecting supply chains. All countries should safeguard their food systems to prevent a nutrition crisis from exacerbating the tough challenges faced around the world. “Safe food and nutrition is an essential part of the health response,” Qu said. He urged all nations to focus on agriculture, with a careful eye to crop seasonality.

“Produce more, produce better, and produce locally if possible,” he said, adding that “food supply problems may lead to higher prices, but in some places they are a matter of life and death.”

The Director-General emphasized the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic, which is already catalyzing a serious recession. He asked countries to be vigilant in not disrupting food value chains, particularly not to affect countries that are highly dependent on food imports, including the small island developing states. QU also showed great concern with the most vulnerable people: “As economic shocks spread southward they will inevitably come to the rural areas where the world’s poorest people live. International cooperation is needed more than ever,” he said.

Furthermore, the Director-General highlighted that in addition to the known dangers, the COVID-19 crisis also presented new opportunities for action, such as improving collaboration among United Nations’ entities at country level, enhancing partnerships with the private sector and turning FAO into a truly digital organization.

More details from the briefing

Laurent Thomas, FAO Deputy Director-General, outlined actions FAO is taking to protect employees – including more than 8000 in decentralized locations – and to enable them to remain productive in pursuit of the core mandate of eradicating hunger. He noted that FAO was hosting more than 2,000 virtual meetings a day, and had ramped up use of solar panels to assure power supply for remote staff.

He emphasized the need for continued support for ongoing emergency work such as fighting the locust invasions in Africa and Asia and boosting the livelihoods of people already facing severe hunger. COVID-19 will generate “cascading” crises for months and even years into the future, he said, adding that “health and food security can become a vicious cycle.”

FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero briefed ambassadors on a variety of tools, resources and actions that FAO is taking to keep global and local food value chains alive and working. He also explained how the FAO Hand in Hand Initiative can help governments and their partners to overcome the challenges by assessing countries’ risks and needs and harnessing private and public sector partners to address them.

He furthered the Director-General’s appeal to increase food production everywhere, noting that the pandemic is likely to generate new food insecurity hotspots. The health emergency has already triggered a major economic contraction, making cooperation across the United Nations system and between countries even more important – “if not the situation will be dramatic,” Torero said.