The two sides will hold an agriculture ministers’ joint forum in Beijing on June 8-9/FILE
SANTIAGO, May 7 – Latin America and the Caribbean will forge a strategic partnership with China on food security as well as agricultural and rural development, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s regional office here said on Monday.
Entering the alliance, the two sides will hold an agriculture ministers’ joint forum in Beijing on June 8-9 and set up a 500,000-tonne joint food reserve to deal with natural disasters and offer humanitarian aid.
Officials from the Chinese government and representatives from more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries met here Monday to prepare for the agriculture ministers’ forum.
During the meeting, the two sides agreed to create a special fund of $50 million to promote agriculture cooperation by establishing eight research and development centers in the region.
The cooperation proposal was first made in June 2012 by the then Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during a meeting of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago.
About The Author
Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.