Rural development is colombia`s peace dividend, president santos says
Monday, 2016/12/19 | 07:55:30
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2016 Nobel Peace Laureate hails FAO’s role in plan to ramp up country’s agriculture after 50-year conflict
Figure: Colombia President Santos and FAO Director-General Graziano da Silva.
FAO 15 December 2016, Rome-Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia and winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, outlined a vision for his country's future after a 50-year civil war, affirming that the peace dividend would be reaped well beyond his nation‘s borders.
"Peace in our country is a peace that will benefit the whole world on many fronts, one of which is that of food security and agricultural development," he said during a visit to FAO.
President Santos recently clinched a peace agreement with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, culminating a lengthy negotiation and decades of conflict that have claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced millions of people.
Colombia, FAO and the European Union, along with the UN Development Program, have all committed to making rural development a priority and a peacekeeping tool.
"Our fields were also victim of the armed conflict, which stripped our rural sector of its productivity, increased the social gap with urban areas, and deepened iniquities in our country," Santos said.
"Colombia has shown there is only one road to peace, the road of dialogue, negotiation, cooperation, inclusion and equity, and that is also the road to sustainable development, where nobody must be left behind," FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said while welcoming the head of state.
He also thanked President Santos for accepting the invitation to join the FAO-Nobel Peace Laureates Alliance for Food Security and Peace. Launched in May, the initiative harnesses winners of the prize to FAO's efforts to break the link between conflict and hunger and promote resilience across the world.
Colombia's peace agreement is an "example of something that seems impossible becoming possible" and stands as a model for all countries as they seek to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, Graziano da Silva added.
Neven Mimica, European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, expressed strong support for "turning the impossible into the possible" and noted that the European Union this week launched a EUR95 million trust fund to boost Colombia's local rural economies.
See more: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/461047/icode/ |
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