The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO) recently featured its fruitful partnership and collaboration with AsiaDHRRA in its latest brief series publication. The FAO highlighted the history of the alliance dating back to 2010, during the formation of the ad hoc committee on the Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific (APRC) in Manila, formalized the partnership in 2020, and renewed it in 2023. The main areas of cooperation identified by the agency are the following:
- Responsible Investments in Agriculture and Food Systems (RAI)
- Agroecology, rural development, digital agriculture, issues related to gender and child labour in agriculture
- Organizational and institutional development
- Advocacy and communication
- Knowledge sharing and capacity development
The FAO has worked with AsiaDHRRA on raising awareness and assessing multi-stakeholder capacity on Responsible Agriculture Investment (ASEAN-RAI), including empowering rural women and youth engagement in RAI. FAO also supported scoping studies/research on digital village initiative (DVI), eliminating child labour (ECL), and case studies on family farming in select ASEAN countries. Presently, AsiaDHRRA implements regional and national projects on digital agriculture – Smallholder Economic Empowerment through Digital Solutions (SEEDS) in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and Resilience, Inclusion, Sustainability, Empowerment, Unity, Progress (RISE-UP), a Project eliminating child labor in Agriculture in the Philippines.
The valuable partnership looks forward to more cooperation on knowledge sharing and regional cooperation designed for family farmers, national plans on capacity building in the region, country-level consultations on agroecology in the context of ASEAN, and regional guidelines on sustainable agriculture.
LINK to the publication
