Martial Bernoux is the Senior National Resources Officer with the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), he discussed the presence of the FOA in the MENA region, as well as climate monitoring and warning systems, sustainable farming and water management, and technology and AI.
- Explain some of the issues with water access and management.
Water is becoming critical in dry regions – the water cycle is disrupted, with too much water in a few days, and then a drought period. Water is becoming critical because in agriculture, we need water to produce crops.
In the FAO, we have a division that deals with water on land, and we have a mega programme, it’s all addressing water scarcity. We’re trying to address different solutions tailored to different countries on the system.
For instance, we can build an irrigation system to ensure water is there, available to the plant, pumping for some time with solar panels, but you have to have access to that energy. We have to build a water system to ensure water is there, available to the plant.
- Do you have any collaborations or special projects coming up?
We have a collaboration with Arena for the energy part. We have collaboration with the League of Arab States, more on the policy level, to have a forum where we discuss with countries, but also with all non state actors together, to develop and establish the solutions that need to be implemented, so knowledge-sharing.
In regard to presence in the MENA region – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya – we are present in all countries. We’re intervening in all the different countries of the MENA region.
- Can you give us some more information about strategies?
We have a development side and we have the emergency side. The emergency side or teams will react when there is a problem – a drone, a flood, a fire. Because we are not the World Food Programme, we are FAO, we are trying to develop the policies and build the systems in preparation to get ready. So an early warning system.
For instance, we are investing in cell phones, because you can have a system at a national level and an international level, that will give you an alert. So basically, we’re developing technologies where the alert will be on the cell phone of all farmers, informing them to be careful. For example, ‘there is an alert of heavy rain, your animals need to be protected in a safe place.’
- What about policies?
We have different policies – for the climate, we have the NDC, Nationally Determined Contribution. We have the National Adaption Plan. We also have the National City Strategy and Action Plan.
We have the UNCCD that is important for your region in terms of land degradation and non-desertification. We also have strategies with targets that aim for net zero.
We need to align all of that because farmers just want to implement the right solution that will tackle all the different challenges. Farmers cannot afford having one solution one day, and another solution another day. So they need to have a solution that will cover all possibilities.
We need to work on the optimisation of the system, where we have a policy or different policies that converge in the same direction on proposing or supporting the same kind of approaches at different levels.
- What about standards and certifications?
We are working on supporting countries for label certification. We are involved in supporting Morocco, trying to help them to develop a label or certification scheme for organ oil.
There is no one size fits all in terms of certification, so there are different ways we can do that. Olive oil is also an important commodity, no matter the region.
We have these certifications that can help to add increment, a premium added value to the price, so when the oil reaches the market, it will sell with the increment, with a premium.
- How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used within the FAO?
We have an AI strategy. There is potential for remote sensing using combined satellite imagery with AI that we can discover better how to put, for instance, the nutrients in the soil. We can already do that, but AI can really increase the speed.
We hope that we will have an app where you take a picture, and it identifies what the plant is suffering from – there is already some preliminary work being done.
