World Food Day: Making agriculture climate-smart in Georgia

Georgia is making an effort to launch climate-smart policies to transform and reorientate agricultural development under the new realities of climate change.

In line with the new global message from World Food Day, Georgia will join about 150 other countries to develop an agriculture strategy to secure sustainable food security in effect of climate change.

Officially World Food Day was celebrated on October 16 but Georgia joined the celebration few days later.

The World Food Day adopts different themes each year as a way to highlight areas for focus and improvement. This year the theme was ‘Climate is changing, food and agriculture must too’ and today authorities discussed how to achieve this at a special meeting in Georgia's capital Tbilisi.

Georgia’s Minister of Agriculture Levan Davitashvili said agriculture in developing countries must undergo a significant transformation in order to meet the related challenges of achieving food security and responding to climate change.

In all strategic documents the Government of Georgia already included the minimal standards related to climate change which is useful for proper development of the [agriculture] sector by minimising the environmental impacts,” said Davitashvili.

Georgia's Agriculture Minister speaks at today's meeting celebrating World Food Day. Photo by Georgia's Ministry of Agriculture. 

Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to Georgia Mamuka Meskhi said it was important for the sector to adopt sustainable development agriculture and adapt to climate change challenges.

The agriculture sector has big potential to reduce the growing pace of climate change. It is important to support the implementation of climate-smart practices in Georgia,” Meskhi said.

Meanwhile as the 68th United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 the International Year of Pulses (IYP), today’s meeting also discussed the recommendations and best practices about how to enhance productivity and production of pulses in Georgia.

The focus of the year was to encourage connections throughout the food chain to better utilise pulse-based proteins, further global production of pulses, better utilise crop rotations and address the challenges in the trade of pulses.

Today’s event gathered representatives of the Georgian Government, FAO, diplomatic corps, international organisations as well as non-governmental organisations, and private sector representatives to celebrate World Food Day in capital Tbilisi.