FAO’s Work in Mountains: Building
the Road to Recovery for Mountain
Peoples
Rosalaura Romeo*, Sara Manuelli, and Samantha Abear
* Corresponding author: rosalaura.romeo@fao.org
Mountain Partnership Secretariat, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00153 Rome, Italy
Ó 2021 FAO. This open access article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO License (http://
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The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations.
The COVID-19 crisis has added urgency to an already difficult
situation in mountains. Mountain communities are highly
dependent on agriculture, tourism, and remittances for their
survival, and their vulnerabilities to a range of challenges—
including climate change, poverty, and food insecurity—have been
exacerbated by the pandemic. This has increased their
vulnerability to poverty and hunger. The aftershocks of COVID-19
deepen concern as to whether the Sustainable Development Goals
of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
can be achieved. The Mountain Partnership is the only United
Nations alliance of partners dedicated to improving the lives of
mountain peoples and protecting mountain environments. Its
secretariat is hosted at the Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations. It is working to improve opportunities for
mountain peoples in the 2030 Agenda spirit of leaving no one
behind.
Leading the way for sustainable mountain
development
Within the United Nations (UN) system, the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) has played a leading role in
sustainable mountain development since 1992, when it was
appointed task manager for Chapter 13 of Agenda 21
(UNCED 1992). It also acted as the lead agency for the
International Year of Mountains in 2002. In 2003, FAO was
mandated by the UN General Assembly to lead the annual
observance of International Mountain Day (Figure 1) on 11
December.
Because of its mandate as lead agency for mountains,
FAO hosts the Mountain Partnership Secretariat (MPS),
currently funded by the Ministry of Agriculture of Andorra,
the Italian Development Cooperation, the Swiss Federal
Office for Agriculture, and FAO. Field programs are
supported by the Italian Development Cooperation and the
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries of Japan.
The MPS serves members through advocacy, capacity
development, communication, and joint initiatives. Since it
was founded in 2002, the Mountain Partnership (MP) has
steadily grown to include over 430 members in 96 countries,
across governments, intergovernmental organizations, and
civil society.
Highlighting solutions in mountains
MP members promote the prioritization of mountains on
national, regional, and global agendas by building synergies
with key UN and international processes. As part of the
process toward the UN Food Systems Summit, the MP
highlighted the relevance of sustainable food systems in
mountains as development drivers. With the Centre for
Development and Environment (MPS and Tribaldos 2021), it
developed an information sheet and hosted an independent
dialogue and a parallel session during the presummit
meeting. Several MP members brought forward solutions for
advancing action and recovery from the impacts of the
COVID-19 pandemic in mountains through sustainable food
systems. Proposals included enabling access to services and
education to create alternative livelihood options and youth
engagement, building equitable and sustainable value chains
for mountain producers, and strengthening and maintaining
traditional knowledge, including agroecology approaches.
In the lead-up to the 15th meeting of the Conference of
the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),
the MPS developed a policy brief calling on the parties to the
CBD to ensure that mountains are explicitly included in the
Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and in all CBD
processes (MPS 2021). The brief promotes the identification,
development, and inclusion of indicators specifically related
to and important for safeguarding mountain biodiversity
and mountain communities. These include the mountain
green cover index (FAO nd) and the indicators presented in
the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) document
Indicators for Elevating Mountains in the Post-2020 Global
Biodiversity Framework 2.0 (UNEP et al 2020).
During an MP side event of the 2021 High-level Political
Forum, the MPS launched its new publication Mountain
Farming Systems – Seeds for the Future (Romeo et al 2021). This
presents a collection of case studies by MP members from
around the world, highlighting experiences of agroecological
mountain farming systems and showcasing their potential to
Mountain Research and Development (MRD)
An international, peer-reviewed open access journal
published by the International Mountain Society (IMS)
www.mrd-journal.org
MountainPlatform
P1Mountain Research and Development Vol 41 No 3 Aug 2021: P1–P3 https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-21-00057. 1