CAIRO: Food security is directly related to the stability of societies and represents an important pillar of the concept of Arab national security, the secretary-general of the Arab League said on Thursday.
Speaking at the opening of the latest ministerial session of the league’s Economic and Social Council, Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the issue had been placed “strongly and urgently on the international and Arab agenda.”
Cooperation and integration on food security had become an urgent need imposed by the circumstances and could not be postponed, he said.
“The initiative that I was honored to launch in order to support efforts to save the agricultural season in Sudan, in cooperation with the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development, was presented before the 112th session,” he said.
That initiative aimed to alleviate the burdens resulting from the conflict, which had threatened to spread hunger and displacement on a large scale, he added.
Aboul Gheit said the meeting discussed many important topics, including ways to support the Palestinian economy in light of the difficulties it faced as a result of the Israeli occupation.
The council meeting came ahead of the fifth session of the Arab Economic and Social Development Summit, which will be held in Mauritania in November. Aboul Gheit said it was vital to prepare for that event to ensure it produced results and decisions that would promote development and modernization in all parts of the Arab world.
He said he sent a high-level delegation to Mauritania at the beginning of August to examine the arrangements being made for the summit.
“The crises that our Arab region and the entire world have gone through (recently) … have produced exceptional circumstances under which we are still living and from which we can draw lessons, the most important of which is the necessity of joint cooperation and solidarity to overcome them with the least damage.”
