It was one of those days when Ylvi Çengaj was working intensively in the village of Rrenc in the southern part of Kosovo1 to establish forests with native seedlings in an abandoned area.

Working to safeguard the food security and livelihoods of vulnerable rural families in Ukraine, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has distributed seed potato kits to 17 740 households from across ten of the country’s oblasts so they can plant food in time for the next harvesting season.

Countries of Europe and Central Asia are united in protecting food production, supplies and trade, even during times of war. For days at the Thirty-third Session of the Regional Conference for Europe in Łódź, Poland, 50-plus FAO Members discussed possible paths and approaches for realizing this goal and for improving nutrition and food security in the region and around the globe.

Ensuring better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life – the “four betters” – in Europe and Central Asia is the end goal as discussions continue on the second day of the Regional Conference for Europe in Lodz, Poland. 

Ministers and high-level representatives from across Europe and Central Asia met today at the FAO Regional Conference for Europe (ERC33) to discuss not only the implications of the war in Ukraine on global agrifood systems and world food security, but also ways of accelerating efforts to transform agrifood systems to assure inclusive and environmentally-friendly development and achieve better nutrition, both regionally and beyond.

Once again, FAO is providing assistance to civil society organizations as they review the achievements of recent years and come up with recommendations for the future. Starting today in Łódź, Poland, a two-day civil society consultation takes place back-to-back with the Regional Conference for Europe, the Organization’s highest governing body for the Europe and Central Asia region.

Digital agriculture has great potential to foster the transformation of agrifood systems and  promote rural development, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), emphasized today at the high-level international conference Vision for the future: transition to digital agriculture, held in Azerbaijan.

FAO offered an online course on lumpy skin disease with more than 400 veterinarians participating. The four-week training in the Russian language started on 7 April through the Virtual Learning Centre (VLC). FAO is supporting the fight against this cattle disease globally and specifically in Europe and Central Asia by training as many veterinarians as possible.

Kazakhstan joins the FAO initiative on improving pesticide lifecycle management and elimination of persistent organic pollutants, implemented in Central Asia and Turkey. The project is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The presence of obsolete and unusable pesticides and their chemical identification is one of the acute problems in Kazakhstan’s agriculture.

The qualified majority of the land owners in the village of Logovardi, located in Pelagonija, a region in the south-west of North Macedonia, adopted a plan on the re-allotment of agricultural land parcels in the Logovardi land consolidation project area.