HLPF Side Event: 'The Digital Transition to Advance Sustainability in Agri-food Supply and Value Chains: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships” – 21 July 2025

HLPF Side Event: "The Digital Transition to Advance Sustainability in Agri-food Supply and Value Chains: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships" - 21 July 2025

Angélica Jácome, Director, FAO Liaison Office with the United Nations in New York

21/07/2025

Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates and Colleagues:

On behalf of FAO, I wish to thank the Government of Italy, Egypt, Kenya, the UN Global Compact and its Italian chapter as well as all who have contributed in one way or another to the preparation of this excellent discussion.

It's time to sum up; I will limit my remarks to three general points.

The first is that promoting sustainable development and advancing worldwide efforts to transform agrifood systems is a hard problem that is getting harder, but it is a problem that has been prioritized by the Members themselves.

As we have seen in the FAO Hand-in-Hand Initiative, - referred to by His Excellency the Undersecretary - now embraced by 78 countries, the indispensable drivers of transformational action are national ownership, national investment, and the aspiration to fulfill national visions for sustainable development.

The second point is that we are convinced that digital transformation can improve both the quantity and quality of access to information and knowledge exchange, while dramatically lowering the costs, thereby accelerating learning, action, and innovation.

Digital transformation can be enabled in many ways.

The Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform makes satellite data accessible and richly interpretable for all developing countries, builds national and local capacities, and enables near real-time assessment of agricultural conditions and more accurate projections of the impacts of major events.

The rapidly expanding Global Network of Digital Agriculture Innovation Hubs, supported now by AI-powered advisory services, enhances access and accelerates the indigenization of knowledge, supplementing rather than supplanting established methods, such as Farmer Field Schools.

More recently, the establishment of the Financing for Shock-Driven Food Crisis Facility, under the auspices of the G7, utilizes new parametric models of risk insurance to anticipate the emergence of food crises, enhance the availability of adequate funding, and ensure a timelier response, thereby saving lives and resources.

The third point is that food and agriculture worldwide, whether it's coffee or jackfruit, are overwhelmingly private activities, despite varying degrees of government support and regulation.

Promoting and enabling private sector collaborations at the national and local levels is not an ideological preference.

It is simply how business gets done, how new ideas are transformed into action, how innovation happens, how investment is triggered, and how lives are made better.

Thank you.