International Conference on Sharing
Innovative Agribusiness Solutions
26-27 November 2008, Cairo, Egypt
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AGRIBUSINESS
HELD ON A FARM
The current global food crisis has highlighted the extreme vulnerability of developing country populations to fluctuations in food prices and supplies. In May 2008, the UNIDO Industrial Development Board, in decision IDB.34/Dec.6, considered that this crisis is a serious and complex challenge that particularly affects the world’s poor and requested the Director-General, inter alia, to prepare a report by mid-September 2008 on how UNIDO can best contribute to a system-wide solution of the global food crisis. Furthermore, at the recent Food Summit in Rome, world leaders called for urgent and coordinated international action to achieve world food security. They requested measures to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, to increase production and integrate with local, regional and international markets, also through South-South cooperation.
In response to this complex challenge, UNIDO is increasing its efforts towards strengthening agribusiness value chains, expanding developing countries’ food supplies and their access to markets, technology and investment. As part of its response, UNIDO is organizing, in cooperation with the Government of Egypt and the SEKEM Initiative, an international conference on sharing innovative agribusiness solutions, to be held in Cairo, Egypt, from 26 to 27 November 2008. To mark the focus on innovation and solutions for agribusiness, the first day of the Conference will be held on a farm where participants will be able to share their views and experiences in an informal and conducive environment. This is the first international conference ever held on a farm.
This conference will bring together agribusiness stakeholders, representatives of public and private technical and financial institutions, international organizations, donors, NGOs and academia to share innovative agribusiness solutions and best practices that can potentially be scaled up and/or transferred to other countries or regions. The conference has four themes, which are described below: (1) Supply/value chains, market access and linkages; (2) Compliance with standards and conformity assessment; (3) Technology and value addition; and (4) Innovative forms of financing.
The conference will not focus on discussing problems and assessing needs; it will rather provide an opportunity for matchmaking between those seeking ways to achieve sustainable agribusiness development and those with innovative solutions, as well as finance for development assistance and investment. As a follow-up, in order to sustain the results of the conference and to promote South-South cooperation, a platform will be initiated to continually identify and disseminate successful agribusiness solutions. In addition, it is planned to launch an innovative agribusiness fund to support the development of the agribusiness sector in Egypt.
Conference preparations are being supported by a team of high-level experts, who are assessing the innovative solutions to identify those most suitable for replication, as well as by an International Advisory Board. The members of the IAB will provide independent views and informed advice on the conference and its follow-up, in order to help promote it and ensure maximum impact. The opening session of the conference will be moderated by the award-winning journalist Todd Benjamin, contributing financial editor for CNN International.
This Conference is a spin-off of the succesful First Global Agro-Industry Forum organized by FAO, UNIDO and IFAD in New Delhi, India 8-11 April this year. www.gaif08.org and was inspired by the success of the UNIDO project “Traceability of agro-industrial products for the European market - ETRACE”.
ETRACE was founded through the Italian-Egyptian Dept for Development Swap, which assists Egyptian farmers and the entire food value chain so as to increase the availability of safe food for the domestic market and facilitate the access of Egyptian food products to export markets. This project is a cooperative effort between UNIDO, the Egyptian Ministry of Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation and the private sector. It addresses emerging problems related to compliance with Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) standards and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) requirements for fresh produce and processed food exports so as to avoid the risk of encountering barriers in export markets. In particular, the project responded to the European Union Food Law Regulation EC/178/2002, which requires that all food and feeds circulating in the EU must be traceable. This means that importers in the EU require exporters to implement traceability systems to control safety and improve supply-chain management. The project is funded under the Italian-Egyptian Debt for Development Swap mechanism and started operation in 2004.
The project approach has been to build local capacity, whereby major efforts and resources have been directed towards training national experts to enable them to provide assistance to users to develop and implement traceability systems. Producers and exporters across the entire food chain have been trained, including producers from Upper Egypt, food transporters and other service providers. An essential feature of the project is that it provides not only technical assistance, but also finance to enable the users to implement the traceability system. The project focuses on fresh produce exporting companies, helping them implement international quality and safety standards and comply with SPS requirements. Assistance has been provided to about 100 of the 200 packing houses in the country (and 8 pilot food processors), and it is estimated that the assisted packing houses account for approximately 85 per cent of exports. Through them, the project has reached around 45,000 farms and thus nearly 5 million people.
