News archive 2015

e-Phyto is designed to eventually replace paper certificates entirely. Envisaged at its heart is a central hub, which will receive on a voluntary basis certificates from National Plant Protection Organisations (NPPOs) in exporting countries and makes them available to the NPPOs of importing countries.

FAO is scaling up its support to Jordan and other countries in the region affected by the humanitarian crisis in Syria that has entered its fifth year.

Nearly a quarter of damages wrought by natural disasters on the developing world are borne by agriculture according to initial results from a new FAO study released at the UN World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The annual meeting of the Commission on Phytosanitary Measures, the governing body of the International Plant Protection Convention, brings together senior plant health specialists from the 181 member countries. The purpose of the standards is to minimize the risks of plant pests circulating across borders and regions in the increasingly vast context of global trade.

Two date palm oases in the United Arab Emirates have joined a growing number of ecosystems that are formally recognized by FAO for their importance as repositories of genetic resources, biodiversity and cultural heritage.

Economic "agrocorridors" can be a strategic tool to draw private capital and large-scale investment to projects that benefit smallholder farmers and boost food security in lower-income countries, according to "Making economic corridors work for the agricultural sector," a new FAO report by agribusiness economist Eva Gálvez Nogales.

PAA Africa is implemented by Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal with technical leadership and expertise from FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP). Now entering its third year, the programme is yielding promising results as detailed in a recently released report.

The FAO Food Price Index declined to a 55-month low in February, dropping 1.0 percent from January and 14 percent below its level a year earlier. Lower prices for cereals, meat and especially sugar more than offset an increase in milk and palm oil prices. FAO also raised its 2014 crop output forecast, indicating robust supply levels.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva told Caribbean Community (CARICOM) heads of government how efforts to combat hunger and malnutrition in the Caribbean have made substantial progress over the past two decades. Barbados, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Surinamehave met the Millennium Development Goal hunger target of halving the proportion of hungry people by 2015, he noted.