Development Issues at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

According to the FAO report ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003’, in the 21st century, in every five seconds one child under the age of five dies from hunger-related diseases. This means that more than 6 million children will be killed by hunger by the end of 2004. Over the world, there are 840 million undernourished people and from them 34 million are in Central and Eastern Europe.

The right to food is a human right and hunger itself is not inevitable, nor acceptable. We live in a world that is richer than ever before and entirely capable of eradicating hunger. Therefore, it is the government’s obligations to protect and fulfill the right to food.

In order to achieve substantial and sustainable reduction in hunger and extreme poverty, and to fight against insecurity, in 1996 and in 2002 FAO convened World Food Summits. The major objective of the Summit of 1996 was to halve the number of undernourished people in the world by 2015.

In order to resolve these challenging matters related also to the transition process in the field of agriculture, FAO established the Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe based in Budapest, Hungary. The FAO Sub-regional Office coordinates activities in 20 countries including the new EU and EU accession countries, the Balkan and the CIS countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

FAO assistance is provided to the member countries through the Regular Programme and Extra-Budgetary Programme. FAO has about 2000 field projects in operation, with a total annual delivery close to 350 million USD. About 10 percent of these are funded from the Regular Programme in the form of so-called TCP projects and SPFS projects. The remaining 90 percent are funded from extra-budgetary resources, mainly in the form of UNDP projects, Government Cooperative Programmes (GCP) projects and Unilateral Trust Fund (UNT) projects. The Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP), with a maximum of two years running and 400.000 USD, enables FAO to rapidly respond to urgent needs for technical and emergency assistance.

The Special Programme of Food Security aims to help, in particular, the low-income food deficit countries to improve their food security. GCP assistance is usually provided by an industrialized country.

The Unilateral Trust Fund enables to give technical projects financed by the recipient countries themselves or from proceeds of loans, credits and grants made by International Financing Institutions. Many countries need technical expertise to formulate and run the projects, therefore they are asking FAO for technical assistance in the respective field.

Formulation and Programming Missions, Assistance to Development, Advisory Services, Training and Emergencies are the most important from TCP project categories to the countries of the sub-region. Formulation and Programming Missions are approved for the countries if governments need the advice of a multidisciplinary mission to the sectors that require strengthening and identifying technical assistance requirements, including identification and formulation of the project proposals, for the preparation of country or rehabilitation programmes or similar exercises conducted by donors which are required for the preparation of donor conferences, round tables…etc.

Assistance to development is assigned for small amount of supplies which may be urgently required to stimulate production, even though they are not related to emergency, such as limited quantities of seeds, pesticides, vaccines, drugs, spare parts, specialized equipments, or even assistance for the repair of equipment.

Advisory services are given frequently to governments when they need assistance in policy matters, or in specialized fields to meet urgent requirements that could not have been programmed. TCP can finance services which are usually covered by short-term missions and can involve repeated assignments over a period of time.

Through training, TCP gives priority to practical training of those who are directly involved in agriculture, fishery, forestry and other related fields. Academic training is excluded except in rare cases where it is directly related to a specific development problem. Whenever it is possible, training will be provided locally.

Emergency projects are designed to meet urgent and immediate needs arising from disasters and unexpected calamities which affect, or are expected to affect the country’s food, agriculture, fishery and forestry situation.

Distribution of TCP resources among the regions marked significant progress particularly in Europe. 7.5 percent of allocation of TCP resources has been oriented to the Central and Eastern European countries recently. Obviously, the highest share of the resources goes to the African countries.

According to the allocation by project category, the most significant distribution goes to the Advisory Services – 45.5 percent, 27.5 percent to the Emergencies, 15.6 percent to Trainings and 7.4 percent to Assistance to development.

Over the recent years, significant progress has been made in decentralizing operational responsibility for projects at country level. In the European region, due to the lack of FAO Representations, for Europe, based in Rome, the operational responsibility for projects rests with the Regional Office. The average number of projects which SEUR operates in the region on a yearly base is between 30 and 35.

The following national projects have been recently implemented in Hungary:

1. Support to the Design and Development of Innovative Forest Management Schemes
2. Upgrading of Fishing Technology in the Lake Balaton
3. Support to the Development of a Strategy for Territorial Organization and Sustainable Land Management in Areas with High Natural Disaster Risk

From the on-going regional projects in Central and Eastern European countries, the most important are ‘The Integrated Pest Management for Western Corn Rootworm in Central and Eastern Europe’, which is implemented in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, the Slovak Republic, as well as the ‘Strengthening Transboundary Animal Diagnosis, Surveillance and Control Capacities’ for Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

In the field of agriculture, from the new EU countries, the Czech Republic is the most significantly involved into the Official Development Aid by supporting the Trust Fund Activities related to Farm Commercialization and Rural Enterprise Development, Territorial Organization and Land Consolidation in the EU, and to the Improvement of the Communication between FAO and Central and Eastern European Countries.

According to the FAO Medium Term Plan 2006-2011, the future FAO development activities are concentrated, first of all, on rural development, food security and safety, and food standard and quality issues. Development of land market and land consolidation, strengthening of the international trade with the agricultural commodities, as well as the development of biotechnologies are challenging issues as well. In the future, FAO will also dedicate priority attention to matters of water management, fishery and forestry. In this regard, new initiatives are expected, particularly from the new members of the European Union from the sub-region of the Central and Eastern Europe, who have already confirmed their interest to play an active role in the most challenging issues of agricultural and rural development.