Meeting development needs through horticulture

Horticultural crops have enormous importance around the world, in ensuring nutrition, incomes, resilience to environmental change and fulfilling a wide variety of valuable purposes from foods and medicines to spices and flower crops for millions of people. However, work to improve these crops and increase their value in development has never received the attention it deserves, largely because of the fragmented nature of the industry and its diverse challenges.

 

In response, leading agencies in the field came together to join forces and develop more joined up agendas and actions through the GlobalHort Initiative. Since its inception, GFAR has been a strong supporter of GlobalHort and its inclusive, interdisciplinary and international operation. The most recent meeting of the GlobalHort multi-stakeholder Board of Directors was held in Brussels, Belgium this month. 

 

Maintaining collective movements is never easy, but this meeting showed a real rebirth of the Initiative. With funding commitments in the pipeline from the Belgian Government and others and institutional commitments now from FAO, the International Society of Horticultural Science, the World Vegetable Centre, the CGIAR via Bioversity International, The African Seed Trade Association, the USAID Horticulture Collaborative Research Support Program, Agrinatura, farmers organizations via the Federation of Free Farmers, and of course the GFAR networks and Fora, Global Hort now mobilizes all key stakeholder sectors involved in horticultural production.

 

GlobalHort partners were last year commissioned through the Global Forum on Agricultural Research to prepare a collective review on the value of agrobiodiversity in development as part of the multi-partner Diversity for Development alliance. This paper is now accepted for formal publication and will provide a valuable baseline for efforts to strengthen our understanding and sustainable use of the many hundreds of valuable crops involved.

 

We thank Remi Kahane for his efforts in building GlobalHort to its present status and look forward to its continuing to grow into an effective and vibrant force for collective actions in this vital sector under its new Executive Secretary, selected during the Board meeting.

 

Photo credit: ©FAO/Olivier Asselin