Working Group – September 25, 2012
Meeting Summary
Introductions and Overview
After preliminaries, members of the drafting team opened the meeting by
 emphasizing the meeting’s goals of looking forward, addressing nuts and bolts of the
draft report, and arriving at a consensus report;
 requesting members’ help in selecting recommendations and deciding whether these
should be far-reaching or relatively simple to implement; and
 responding to clarifying questions by members.
Review and Comments on Draft Report
Each member offered comments on the draft report, praising the report for its strong attention to
the process of reform, while noting that the report should:
 address the need for FAO in future decades in addition to its current effectiveness;
 make more specific and actionable recommendations;
 feature South-South learning and the role of emerging countries;
 provide a clearer explanation of the political economy and governance of the
organization;
 improve justification of the focus on FAO;
 identify the substantive areas of work where institutional traits limit effectiveness;
 more fully reflect recent changes, including the leadership of the new director-general
and the Strategic Thinking Process;
FAO in the Future
Members deliberated on the future contribution of FAO to food security and poverty reduction,
focusing on the following issues:
 FAO’s diverse mandate, including both investing in rural development in the least
developed countries and contributing to a well-regulated global food and agriculture
system. These different functions have different constituencies among member states.
 Providing technical capacity for improving food systems is FAO’s primary purpose, but
it is challenged by a shallow roster of such capacity globally. Members debated the
optimal management of such capacity, with most members favoring flexible institutional
arrangements—particularly trust funds—permitting the organization to adjust its
capacity mix in response to changing needs, while other members argued that such
arrangements can erase institutional memory and thereby reduce effectiveness.
 FAO has struggled to improve its decentralized presence while retaining core
institutional capacity.
Policy Recommendations and Next Steps
Members’ discussions of the recommendations and next steps for the Working Group centered
on the strategy-formulation process underway and the new FAO leadership. Members considered
that the new DG has shown fairly promising and strong leadership, and it would be easier to
understand the “state of play” after the upcoming meetings of the Joint Meeting and Council.
FAO would also be more receptive to external guidance at that point. The Working Group
therefore reached a consensus to produce a second report, with an agreed draft outline and a
wider consultation process. The second report should include a conceptual framework to
articulate the world’s needs for FAO and its partner institutiosn. The original draft would serve
as a background paper.
Other matters
Members furthermore discussed FAO’s role in China—noting much greater Chinese interest in
FAO’s role as a facilitator and its work on food safety—and their own related work before
closing the meeting.