Saudi Arabia's King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSRelief) announced an ambitious new five-year strategic joint cooperation agreement with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
As a first step under the new expanded partnership, KSRelief contributed $5 million to improve the food security and nutrition of more than 24,000 highly vulnerable smallholder farming families in Yemen.
It will provide them with high quality vegetable seeds, tools and irrigation kits and animal feed and mineral blocks, while also offering them training on nutrition-sensitive agriculture to help them improve their diets
The agreement commits the partners to scale up joint action to meet humanitarian needs, address drivers of acute food security and help at-risk agricultural communities build resilience to shocks that undermine their productive potential.
It also outlines efforts to improve knowledge sharing on agricultural best practices, engage in data-driven development work via FAO's Hand-in-Hand Initiative and advance agricultural innovation to help small-scale food producers achieve better production and build better lives.
FAO Director-General QU Dongyu and KSRelief's Supervisor-General Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Rabeeah signed the agreement at FAO's Rome headquarters on Tuesday.
"We are looking forward to bolster our partnership not only in the humanitarian arena but also in the area of data and knowledge for development, including work under FAO's innovative Hand-in-Initiative, which is opening up new opportunities for vulnerable agricultural communities in the Near East and North Africa region and beyond," said Dongyu.
"By working together, we can make a huge difference in the lives of rural communities pushed to the brink by crises."
Rabeeah, for his part, said the signing of the agreement represents the expanding partnership between KSRelief and FAO to help many people in need as well as help communities develop to be more resilient and thereby become more self-dependent.
Saudi Arabia and FAO have been long standing partners and with the establishment of KSRelief, ties have become closer and expanded into capacity building and exchange of information.
Both bodies have been keen to address global issues to improve life quality and ensure safer environment.
KSRelief is thrilled to see this relationship become a model to be followed for helping communities and countries in need, he concluded.
Since its establishment in 2005, KSrelief has provided about $33 million in support to FAO emergency and resilience interventions.
KSRelief has been FAO's largest humanitarian resource partner among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states in addressing food insecurity and malnutrition and reaching to the people in need the most.
