The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO for short, is an international organization that focuses on food security and food safety. The FAO was founded in 1945 as a UN body to protect food and raw materials. The FAO is divided into seven compartments, from agriculture protection and forestry to finance. The organization receives funds from various countries and private donors.
What is the FAO?
The FAO, or Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in full, is an organization dedicated to combating hunger worldwide. Translated into Dutch, it is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The FAO is an organization that collaborates with various governments. A total of 191 countries are members. The FAO has offices in 130 countries, with its headquarters in Italy.
Incorporation
The FAO was founded in 1945 to ensure food security and food safety. The FAO was established as a specialized body of the United Nations focused on food. Since its founding, the FAO has established numerous programs and organized conventions.
What does FAO do?
The activities of the FAO are divided into 4 compartments.
- Making information available The FAO functions as a knowledge network. Information available from experts is collected, analyzed and provided so that it becomes available to more people. The FAO also publishes newsletters, reports, books and magazines. The organization is active online on its own site (www.fao.org) and manages various forums.
- Sharing policy knowledge The FAO has a lot of experience with member states on agricultural policy. They share this knowledge with countries that need it. FAO helps draw up strategies for a country to stimulate rural development and combat hunger.
- Meeting place for countries FAO provides neutral places where different countries can talk to each other, regardless of whether they are rich or poor countries. In this way, the countries themselves can come to an understanding and make joint agreements.
- Bringing knowledge where it is needed, merely collecting knowledge and making it available is not enough. For many people in the world, knowledge remains inaccessible. That is why the FAO has thousands of projects worldwide, in which the organization provides the technical knowledge.
Departments
The FAO is divided into 7 departments, each with their own function.
- Agriculture and consumer protection: this department focuses, among other things, on combating infectious diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease.
- Economic and social development: focuses on developing better conditions for people, especially in poor areas.
- Fisheries: this department mainly tries to make fishing sustainable and prevent overfishing.
- Forestry: forest areas and the products that come from forests must be managed sustainably, also for future generations.
- Business services and finance: mainly within the organization and between the organization and its members
- Natural Resources and Environment: Resources are all around us. This department focuses, among other things, on all these natural resources to get the most out of them without damaging them.
- Technical cooperation: in many poor areas, technical development is low, resulting in little food production. This department helps those who need more technical development to obtain it
What does the FAO do – specifically
Research
An important point of the FAO is conducting and publishing research. These studies are accessible to everyone via their website. Research concerns, among other things, infectious animal diseases and plant diseases, but also ways to increase agricultural production and sustainable fishing.
Food Safety
Food safety is an important focus of the FAO. Food is shipped all over the world, so if a disease breaks out somewhere it can have enormous consequences. That is why the FAO sets rules for the export of products, so that food becomes safe. In the European Union, stricter requirements sometimes apply than those set by the FAO, but in many areas the guidelines are the same. If products can transmit diseases, they may not be sold in any of the FAO affiliated states. Most products must be destroyed. In the field of food safety, the FAO works closely with the WHO, the World Health Organization, or World Health Organization.
Food production
Combating world hunger is surely the most important point of the FAO. A noble goal, but how does the organization approach it? Research and development are key words here. Research into new ways to achieve higher food production and increase efficiency. Development focuses on moving knowledge from research to practice.
Funds
All that research and the dissemination of knowledge costs a lot of money. That has to come from somewhere. In 2010, all FAO programs and projects cost a combined US$903 million. The majority of these costs are financed by contributions from governments, both mandatory and voluntary, and trust funds.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO for short, focuses on food production and food safety. The FAO has a broad concept of food. It focuses not only on agriculture or livestock farming, but also on fisheries and products from forests and nature reserves.
read more
- What is and what does the WHO, the World Health Organization?