Farmers Welcomed as “Game-Changers” of Agrifood Systems

Director-General QU Dongyu today welcomed farmers from around the globe to FAO headquarters for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO).

“You are the game changers of agrifood systems,” he said, noting that precisely those systems need to be urgently transformed to address hunger and other global challenges.

Most of the worlds 608 million farms are run by an individual or a family and rely primarily on family labor, operating at a small scale yet producing the vast majority of the world’s food in value terms. Those farmers also fulfil key environmental, social and cultural roles and have a “unique understanding and ability to protect local ecologies, knowledge and heritage,” Qu added.

Qu hailed the WFO as a “great example of effective collaboration” with more than 80 national farmers’ organizations from all over the world under its umbrella. Such organizations can serve a host of functions regarding scale, knowledge sharing and policy change, the Director-General said, emphasizing that effective partnerships are at the core of FAO’s work.