Last year’s floods in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina serve as an example of how natural disasters can devastate the agricultural sector and farming-based livelihoods of millions of people.  

In order to learn from the past and prepare for the future, a training workshop on disaster risk reduction and management was organized by FAO in Fruska Gora, Serbia earlier this month.

At the workshop, a new National Disaster Risk Management Programme was introduced.  Some 30 participants, including professionals from Serbia’s Ministry of Agricultural and Environmental Protection, the acting assistant director for the Office of Reconstruction and Flood Relief, and FAO experts worked to define priority activities for disaster risk reduction and management activities in the agricultural sector.