Ministers of Agriculture from the Americas will meet in Costa Rica

Ministers of Agriculture and Livestock from 34 American countries will meet from October 29th to 31st in San José, Costa Rica, where they will debate crucial issues in a key sector for the world's food supply, but which faces serious economic challenges, commercial, environmental and demographic needs to fulfill their role in ensuring global food security.

The meeting will serve as a milestone for the meeting of the Inter-American Board of Agriculture (IABA), formed by the 34 ministers of Agriculture from the member countries of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). The JIA is also the highest governing body of this hemispheric organization specialized in agricultural and rural development.

The debates and deliberations of the ministers and secretaries of Agriculture will serve to guide and promote the modernization of this sector in the Americas and provide decisive support for the institutional renewal actions that IICA implements.

In the hemispheric organization, nations that are at the forefront of global agricultural production coexist, such as the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile, with states whose agricultural sector has not yet been developed to its maximum potential, especially in Central America and Caribbean.

"In America, agriculture has different social, economic, technological or commercial realities, but all countries face the enormous challenge of producing more sustainably, inclusively and competitively. The Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas 2019 will be a landmark to address these differences, to connect countries, people, technologies and knowledge in favor of agricultural development and the people who live in the countryside”, stated the General Director of IICA, Manuel Otero.

The 2019 Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas will also serve to generate dialogues and build alliances with the private sector. The ministers will participate in forums together with representatives of global companies directly linked to agricultural production, such as Microsoft and Bayer, among others.

Three panels will be held at the continental meeting, which will be shared by ministers and senior executives, whose themes will be: “Opportunities for rural inclusion in the digital era”; “Towards new balances between productivity and sustainability and “Health, safety and quality for the future of commerce”.

For Otero, the themes of the Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas 2019 reflect the most urgent needs of a world that must increasingly debate and prioritize the role of public policies to stimulate agricultural and rural development, in a way that meets the needs of feeding the population over the coming decades, within a framework of respect for the environment.

The American continent has a privileged situation to become a guarantee of food and nutritional security in the world thanks to its diversity and relative abundance of biological, water, land and knowledge resources.

"We require climate-smart, modern agriculture with broad use of technology, but also inclusive and that generates new development opportunities for traditionally relegated groups, such as women and rural youth", indicated Otero.

In the assessment of Federico Villarreal, Director of Technical Cooperation at IICA, “the economic, commercial, environmental and social transformations that have shaped the world we live in make traditional political responses unreasonable, since the agriculture of the future is one of the great opportunities for the Americas, as it proposes the repositioning of its actors and rurality itself”.

The IABA has met every two years since 1981 and the October meeting will be the first since the inauguration of IICA Director General, Manuel Otero, in January 2018.