Joint Statement of 2012 APEC Ministerial Meeting

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APEC | 6 September 2012

Vladivostok, Russia, 5 - 6 Sep 2012
2012 APEC Ministerial Meeting
Joint Statement

 
....Strengthening Food Security
 
Implementing the Kazan Declaration on APEC Food Security
 
We reaffirm our commitment to ensure regional and global food security. We welcome the endorsement of the Kazan Declaration on APEC Food Security at the Second Ministerial Meeting on Food Security held in May 2012 in Kazan, Russia and reaffirm the APEC Ministers Responsible for Food Security’s commitment to strengthen food security through promoting open and transparent markets, increasing sustainable agricultural production and productivity, considering the diversity of environmental conditions world-wide and positive externalities of agriculture, conducting joint research and development, supporting agricultural technology dissemination, enhancing food safety and quality, facilitating market oriented trade and developing food markets and related infrastructure, reducing post-harvest losses along the entire food supply chain, improving access to food for vulnerable groups of the population, including those facing an emergency due to natural and anthropogenic disasters, and working towards sustainable management of ocean and marine ecosystems and combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and associated trade. Recognizing that bans and other restrictions on the export of food may cause price volatility, especially for economies that rely on imports of staple products, we reconfirm the commitments against protectionism made by APEC Leaders. Bearing in mind the contribution of the World Food Program (WFP) in regard to situations of food security crisis, we also reaffirm our commitment to remove restrictions and extraordinary taxes on food purchased for non-commercial humanitarian purposes. 
 
Sustainable agriculture
 
Given the complexity and cross-cutting nature of food security, we emphasize the need to achieve sustainable agricultural growth. In pursuing this goal, we will take concrete actions to boost investment in agriculture while actively adopting existing and innovative agricultural technologies. We commit to create an enabling environment that encourages increased public and private investment in agriculture, take note of the positive role of foreign direct investment on increasing agricultural production. In doing so, we appreciate the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI) elaborated by the World Bank, FAO, IFAD and UNCTAD, support the ongoing extensive consultations on these principles, and welcomed the approval of the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VG). We welcome the work being done under the Global Research Alliance on agriculture and climate change. 
 
Policy Partnership on Food Security
 
We commend the joint efforts of the APEC economies and business communities to establish the APEC Policy Partnership on Food Security (PPFS), a high-level mechanism to ensure the policy and technical cooperation necessary to achieve food security in the region. We support the PPFS’ long-term goal to succeed by 2020 in setting up a food system structure sufficient to provide lasting food security to the economies of the region. We welcome the PPFS as the primary consultative forum for consideration of food security policies involving relevant APEC working groups. We commend the adoption of PPFS Action Plan for 2012-2013 which envisages developing a road map to achieve the PPFS’ long-term goal and setting up working groups to elaborate concrete recommendations towards its achievement. 
 
Agricultural technical cooperation and capacity building
 
We recognize that agricultural technical cooperation continues to play a vital role in increasing food production, strengthening capacity-building in the field of agricultural technologies for the member economies and disseminating advanced agricultural technologies on a market-based and voluntary basis in the region. We support the technical cooperation and capacity building activities in education and training, promoting sustainable environmental and natural resource management and infrastructure development related to food security, enhancing agricultural information systems and analysis, and improving preparedness for natural and anthropogenic disasters and cross-border threats. 
 
Strengthening food safety through capacity building and encouraging regulatory cooperation
 
We recognize that food safety capacity-building and regulatory cooperation play an important role in promoting public health, facilitating trade and increasing food security. We recognize the work of the Food Safety Cooperation Forum (FSCF) in building dialogue among food safety regulators and its Partnership Training Institute Network (PTIN), which builds on a public private partnership to deliver food safety capacity building, including preventive control measures and strengthening of laboratory capacity. We support the creation of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund of the Global Food Safety Partnership administered by the World Bank which originated from these efforts and use the FSCF and PTIN as a model for expanding food safety capacity building globally. 
 
Application of innovative biotechnologies for food security in APEC
 
We welcome work to promote transparent and functioning regulatory systems to ensure safety and to facilitate investment in and the development and application of innovative biotechnologies for food security in APEC. We reaffirm the important potential of biotechnology for contributing to food security and sustainability and the role of APEC in assisting economies in developing transparent regulatory systems that ensure safety, promote public confidence in those systems, and facilitate trade, including in situations of low-level presence of recombinant-DNA plant materials. 
 
Study on Food Security policies in APEC
 
We note the findings of the Policy Support Unit study on food security policies across the APEC region, which highlighted the current food security needs and priorities as well as the policy environment in order to address regional food security issues more effectively. We also note the in-depth analysis of the food security situation in the APEC region is based on the four dimensional food security conceptual model of food availability, economic and physical access to food, and the utilization of food. We acknowledge the useful observations of the study on common food security concerns in all APEC economies, including growing population, climate change, natural resource constraints, decreasing investments in agriculture, natural disasters, rising cost of food, and lack of nutrition education. We particularly emphasize the findings that some food security policies implemented at the domestic level can compromise the food security objectives of other economies and undermine the regional food security situation. 
 
Asia-Pacific Food Security Information Platform
 
We welcome the launch of the Asia-Pacific Food Security Information Platform (APIP) in March 2012 in Japan, which was designed as a web-based resource to share regional information on food security. We encourage APIP to go forward with the steps directed to establish links with the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) created in the framework of the G20 in June 2011 in Paris to strengthen cooperation between the two systems. We urge APEC economies to provide the APIP with the relevant data and information in order to increase information sharing and effectiveness of this important tool. 
 
Supporting sustainable management of marine ecosystems, fisheries and aquaculture
 
We support work to ensure the implementation of initiatives on sustainable management of marine ecosystems, fisheries and aquaculture. We support the efforts on combating IUU fishing and associated trade, and on addressing sustainability of ocean and marine resources through a holistic approach. We recognize that fisheries and aquaculture are significant components of marine ecosystem that remains essential to the livelihood and economic well-being for many APEC economies and instruct officials to deepen the work in this sphere. We encourage efforts to mainstream ocean related issues in supporting regional economic integration in line with the Leaders` Growth Strategy. 
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