Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development on the Agenda of the FAO Committee on Agriculture

Member Governments of FAO will discuss on Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) during the 19th session of the FAO's Committee on Agriculture from 13-16 April 2005.

The basis of the discussion will be a paper prepared by FAO which summarizes among others, the main lessons learned since the First Earth Summit held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro about SARD and how to achieve it. The paper highlights FAO´s commitment to the goal of sustainable agriculture and rural development within its Strategic Framework 2000-2015 and the Millennium Development Goals; presents a framework for giving greater coherence to the FAO portfolio of SARD-related activities; summarizes the achievements of the SARD Initiative, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Partnership Initiative facilitated by FAO in its role as Task Manager for Chapter 14; and sets out key issues for COAG consideration and guidance.

Following the plenary discussion on SARD, a side event on SARD and Civil Society will take place on 14 April. Three prominent civil society and government panelists will take part and offer diverse but complementary views on sustainable agriculture and rural development and underscore the importance of civil society, government and intergovernmental collaborative efforts for the implementation of SARD, promote people-centred approaches to scale up local level successes and contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The Side Event will also gives an opportunity to launch the new FAO-wide SARD web site, soon to be available at http://www.fao.org/sard