Rattan Lal to lead consensus-building dialogue on agriculture and the environment in the Americas ahead of COP27

San Jose, 2 June 2022 (IICA) - In his capacity as Goodwill Ambassador of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), scientist Rattan Lal, the world’s leading authority on soil science and winner of the 2020 World Food Prize, will lead a dialogue and consensus-building process among countries of the Americas ahead of the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held this year in Egypt.
 
The announcement was made by the Director General of IICA, Manuel Otero, during a meeting held on Tuesday, which brought together about twenty Secretaries and Ministers of Agriculture of the countries of the Americas. Representatives of 34 countries discussed joint approaches to the urgent need to transform the agriculture sector in response to climate change and requested that the inter-American organization coordinate regional consensus-building efforts with a view to including agriculture in international negotiations on climate change (see separate press release).
 
“I welcome IICA Goodwill Ambassador and 2020 World Food Prize winner, Rattan Lal, who has agreed to serve as our ambassador in leading this process of dialogue, consensus-building and the search for greater harmony between agriculture and the environment ahead of COP 27”, announced Otero.
 
Lal’s appointment and the countries’ request to IICA will result in significant milestones in the lead-up to COP27. The organization specializing in agricultural and rural development will work together with its Member States to ensure that their needs are addressed, bringing farmers to the forefront and generating modern and effective public policies for agriculture that strike an adequate balance between productivity and sustainability.
 
Lal, an IICA Chair in Soil Science and Director of the Center for Carbon Management and Sequestration (C-MASC) at The Ohio State University, is globally renowned for his work, which focuses on the potential of soils to help solve global issues such as climate change, food security and water quality.
 
Together with the specialized agency of the Inter-American System, C-MASC leads the “Living Soils of the Americas” initiative, which unites public and private efforts in the fight against soil degradation – a phenomenon that threatens to undermine countries’ capacity to sustainably meet the food demand.
 
Earlier this year, Lal was appointed by the President of the United States, Joe Biden, as a new member of the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD). Headquartered in Washington, D.C., BIFAD was established in 1975 by the U.S. Congress to advise the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on agricultural and higher education issues related to food insecurity in developing countries.
 
The ministerial meeting, entitled “Meeting of the Americas on Climate Change and Agriculture: On the Road to the 2022 Summit of the Americas and Beyond”, was held in preparation for the Heads of State and Government Meeting to be held next week in Los Angeles, California.
 
The second phase of this meeting, called the Summit of the Americas for Climate Action in Agriculture, will take place at IICA Headquarters in San Jose, Costa Rica, in September, prior to COP27, which will be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November.
Under the leadership of a renowned scientist such as Rattan Lal, IICA will support the organization of COP27 through its hemispheric platform, which provides agricultural representatives and officials of countries of the Americas with a unique and ideal means of exchanging perspectives on the agriculture sector’s assertive participation in international climate change negotiations.

More information:
Institutional Communication Division.
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int