Summary
The Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Connecting Smallholders to Markets convened on Wednesday, 8 June 2016, at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), in Rome, Italy. Building on the outcomes of the 2015 High-Level Forum on Connecting Smallholders to Markets, the objective of the two-day meeting is to finalize a set of recommendations for adoption at the 43rd Plenary Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS 43) in October 2016.
Opening the meeting, OEWG Chair Anna Gebremedhin, Finland, thanked all stakeholders for their contributions to the preparatory process. She invited participants to provide their inputs on the Chair’s proposal, containing six introductory paragraphs and 19 recommendations, noting it was based on the outcome of informal consultations held on 28 April 2016.
Participants then embarked on a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the text. Informal consultations, as well as a “Friends of the Chair” group facilitated by Gerda Verburg, Ambassador of the Netherlands to the Rome-based UN Agencies, met throughout the day to develop consensus on contested language.
In the evening, the OEWG adopted revised language prepared by the informal groups and resumed consideration of the remaining introductory paragraphs. Discussions will continue on Thursday.
IISD Reporting Services, through its ENB+ Meeting Coverage, has provided a briefing note of the April session and a summary report of the June session. Our April briefing note is available in HTML or PDF format. Our June summary report is available in HTML or PDF format.