AGU participates in regional meeting on food, water security promotion

Manama, Nov. 28 (BNA): The Arabian Gulf University (AGU), represented by Water Resources Management Professor Dr Waleed Zubari, recently participated in the Regional Meeting on Promoting Food and Water Security in the Arab Region. Held in the Jordanian Capital Amman, the meeting was organised by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). AGU is participating in the meeting as a cooperative scientific centre in the Arabian Gulf region. Dr. Zubari pointed out that the meeting will discuss promoting food and water security in the Arab Region. He mentioned four dimensions of this scope of work; food availability, accessibility to it, its stability, and its nutritional value, adding that these four dimensions are measured by a number of indicators. Dr. Zubari stressed that AGU looks forward to continuing the implementation of the project through its implementation on the GCC countries and to develop it continuously, taking into account its specificity and nature. The meeting aims to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to enhancing food and water security through cooperation and policy coordination. ESCWA has adopted an initiative to promote food and water security in the Arab region since 2015 with the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Regional Office for the East Near East and North Africa, the Arab Organisation for Agricultural Development (AOAD) and the Arab Centre for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD). This initiative is designed to enable officials to address the challenges related to food security and climate change within the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and related Arab strategies and initiatives. By 2019, the key achievements of the initiative included the availability of accurate and varied information to inform those responsible for the status of the region by strengthening technical capacity to assess the impacts of climate change on strategic agricultural crops, adopting and using a common regional framework to monitor the food security situation, and promoting the application and adoption of good agricultural practices on a national level, in addition to promoting better policy and programme coordination across ministries of water and agriculture through regional and national institutional mechanisms.