In the morning of October 15 local time, Premier Li Keqiang met in Rome with Director-General José Graziano da Silva of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
Li Keqiang spoke positively of the FAO's efforts in safeguarding global food security, boosting international agricultural cooperation, and promoting the cause of global poverty reduction. He pointed out that safeguarding food security not only requires each country to make the issue of food and agriculture the top priority of national development, but also calls for the concerted efforts of the international community. As the largest developing country, China still has an impoverished population of over 100 million, although it has solved the problem of food and clothing. We will make our greatest efforts to completely eliminate poverty caused by hunger, and are confident in well solving the food problem for the 1.3 billion Chinese people mainly with our own efforts, so as to make our contributions to global food security. China is willing to further strengthen communication, coordination and mutual support with the FAO, and deepen South-South cooperation as well as tripartite cooperation in agriculture. I hope that the FAO continues to give full play to its role in perfecting the global governance system for food and agriculture, strengthening the intensity of policy coordination and resource integration, and promoting international agricultural cooperation.
Graziano said that China, as one of the closest cooperative partners of the FAO, has made significant contributions to world food security and hunger elimination. The FAO is willing to further enhance cooperation with China, so as to jointly promote the stability of the global food market as well as South-South cooperation and to safeguard global food security.