Food and Agriculture Organisation representative to Pakistan Patrick T Evans has promised to provide Pakistan technical support to enhance agricultural productivity and food security.
He expressed these views while presenting his credentials to Advisor to Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs and National Security Sartaj Aziz here at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While discussing the urgent needs of the agriculture sector in Pakistan, both agreed on the need to improve collaboration to enable local farmers to learn better agriculture techniques and improve their living standards. FAO has been active in Pakistan since 1947 and had helped Pakistan over the years to strengthen agriculture, livestock and fisheries production in the country. The need to increase the contribution of the Pakistani agriculture sector to GDP with value addition and expansion of exports was discussed.
In recent decades, FAO has trained thousands of farmers to increase on-farm productivity. FAO continues to work with government and farmers organizations to strengthen the role of women in agriculture, to improve water use and management, to improve seed quality and on-farm management techniques, as well as post-harvest handling, value addition and marketing.
Sartaj Aziz advised the FAO representative to work with Government counterparts to improve the policy environment and referred to documents that he developed in the area of Food Security and Agricultural Development in Pakistan. Aziz also recounted the success stories in the area of Agricultural Growth in Pakistan and advised FAO to work with proven models from both Pakistan and globally.
Patrick T Evanshas recently arrived in Pakistan as the new representative of The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Before coming to Pakistan, Patrick served in Sri Lanka for 5 years as the FAO representative for Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Patrick’s career with FAO started in 1988 in Nepal working on community forestry development for the Terai region. After 4 years in Nepal, Patrick moved to Jamaica to work with farmers in the central region on agro-forestry development. From Jamaica, it was Tonga next in the South Pacific and later back to Asia in Bhutan. From Bhutan, Patrick moved to Cambodia where he spent 8 years developing community based natural resource management of forests and fisheries. In 2005, he was awarded FAO’s prestigious B.R. Sen Award as the outstanding field staff of the year. Subsequent assignments took Patrick to East Timor and Mongolia.
