Ministerial Segment of the High-Level Political Forum 2025, General Debate

Ministerial Segment of the High-Level Political Forum 2025, General Debate

Halka Otto, Senior Liaison Officer, FAO Liaison Office with the UN in New York

23/07/2025

Thank you, Mr. Chair,

Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda demand nothing less than the best we have to offer.

The interlinked and indivisible nature of the SDGs necessitates new thinking and new approaches to working and acting.

The FAO Global Roadmap, for example, offers sophisticated, data- and science-based modeling and analysis to help nations and communities define unique pathways to agrifood systems transformation, ensuring good food for all, today and tomorrow.

The Roadmap also calls for breaking down silos within and among organizations, prioritizing pragmatic solutions, articulating a strategic vision with a unified language and a shared sense of purpose, and adapting existing mechanisms or spurring new ones for more effective, collaborative action.

By establishing technology-enabled platforms, such as the Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform, the Global Network of Digital Agricultural Innovation Hubs, and the more recent Financing for Shock-Driven Food Crisis Facility, we are harnessing digital transformation to empower our Members and citizens at all levels.

Through institutional innovations such as the partnership-oriented Hand-in-Hand Initiative and the youth-driven World Food Forum, and by upgrading long-standing arrangements, such as the FAO Investment Centre, a more than 60-year-old partnership with the World Bank, we are rapidly scaling the human and financial resources needed for the high ambitions of the 2030 Agenda.

Together, we are mobilizing the best that the 21st century has to offer to address the most profound and complex challenges of our time.