Minister Lehtomäki: Fighting against poverty by developing agriculture

Press release 178/2005
25 May, 2005


Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Paula Lehtomäki has called together a cooperation network with an aim to improve the chances of supporting agriculture and food security in developing countries. “When combating extreme poverty we should place more and more emphasis on developing the agriculture and rural areas of developing countries. It creates the conditions for heightened national food security and food production. Only this way we can beat hunger in the world,” Minister Lehtomäki explains.

The target with the new cooperation network is to act as kind of a development political think tank for rural development and to bring together the experts in the field from different sectors of society. The measures taken by the public sector are not enough to guarantee the achievement of goals in global development. What is needed is cooperation and partnership between sectors of administration, expert organisations as well as other organisations. This way we can improve the consistency and efficiency of Finnish development policy and bring the expertise of all Finnish actors to common use.

“I hope that the actors of rural development in organisations, ministries as well as in research would welcome the challenge and bring their resources to common use,” Minister Lehtomäki pointed out in the establishment meeting of the network.

Lehtomäki believes that Finnish know-how is particularly high in sustainable forestry industry and cultivation under difficult conditions, cooperative ventures and successful organisation of producer organisations. “Our goal is to focus Finnish development policy so that we can bring added value to international development. This added value is generated on one hand through Finland’s cultural and historical set of experiences and values based on those experiences, and on the other hand through the special strengths and know-how that Finland has developed within certain fields of activity,” Minister Lehtomäki described.

In addition to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the other sectors represented in the establishment meeting of the cooperation network were the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners, as well as the Helsinki University’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

Additional information: Director of Unit for Sectoral Policy Pekka Puustinen, Department for Development Policy, tel. +358 9 1605 6410 and Satu Mäki, Special Adviser to the Minister, tel. +358 40 829 3298.

Ministry for Foreign Affairs Development Cooperation(Link to another website.)