Today, Tuesday, Minister of Agriculture Khaled Al-Hanaifat said that the ministry is in the process of establishing a regional center for food security based on studies related to food security and benefiting from the experiences of different countries in this field.

He added, during his meeting today with the United Nations Resident Coordinator and Acting Humanitarian Coordinator, Ghulam Muhammad Ishaq Zai, and the representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Jordan (FAO), Nabil Assaf, that the ministry is in the process of establishing a national seed bank that will be an incubator for the genetic assets of Jordanian seeds, pointing to a tender since A short time to achieve this.

During the meeting, the minister discussed the conditions and challenges that Jordan has experienced during the past decade, such as climate change, water scarcity, and the consequences of the continuous asylum on the Kingdom, which put pressure on the Kingdom’s natural resources, reviewing the impact of the region’s crises and the Corona pandemic on the economic sectors, especially the agricultural sector, and the closures that followed the pandemic. It made it more difficult to export through the Kingdom’s land crossings. Al-Hanaifat indicated that in the context of King Abdullah II’s interest in the issue of national food security, the ministry completed last year the preparation of the national strategy for food security, indicating that work is underway to implement the strategy’s provisions, which led to raising the Kingdom’s index globally in food security.

Al-Hanaifat pointed out that the Kingdom is suffering from the phenomenon of environmental displacement due to the effects of climate change, which led to the displacement of many rural and Badia residents to urban areas due to poverty and unemployment, indicating that the ministry prepared an integrated plan that included clear activities and performance indicators to develop solutions to a number of challenges, the most important of which is climate change. and water harvesting operations, providing job opportunities in the countryside and the desert, and reducing unemployment rates, especially among women.

He stressed the importance of the efforts of the United Nations agencies in the Kingdom to help Jordan, thanking the supporting bodies and the United Nations, which carried a burden with the Ministry of Agriculture to face the various challenges that the Kingdom went through.
For his part, Ghulam Muhammad thanked the Ministry of Agriculture for activating cooperation between United Nations agencies working in issues of food security, agriculture and climate change, pointing to the United Nations’ support for the ministry’s efforts to achieve food security, through cooperation in implementing the strategy.

He said that the United Nations wants the participation of the Ministry of Agriculture in supporting refugees and Jordanian communities in the Kingdom and looks forward to more cooperation in this field, especially after Jordan has become a safe home for many refugees and its keenness to provide them with appropriate services, in addition to increasing cooperation between the two sides in the issues of water, work and climate change. and capacity-building to achieve sustainable development, requesting that the United Nations Office be provided with a project to establish a regional center for food security studies to be established in the Kingdom.

In turn, the representative of the FAO, Nabil Al-Assaf, stressed the importance of cooperation between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Food and Agriculture Organization and the concerted efforts to achieve food security despite the difficulties in achieving the goals of sustainable development due to the succession of challenges to the Kingdom of population increase, limited natural resources and increased demand for food, which requires increased directing financial support and technician to face these challenges, pointing out that the FAO is working on preparing for an agricultural tourism project to preserve Jordanian varieties of plants.