The Global Agricultural Research Partnership, which aims to enable hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty and avoid chronic hunger, will continue to funded by Switzerland with CH50.4 million over the next three years, according to a foreign ministry statement on Wednesday.
The research programme conserves the world’s largest collections of cultivated plants in a bid to preserve genetic resources for future generations. It also facilitates cooperation between smallholder farms and local processing industry in several countries.
The cabinet also decided to maintain its contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) with CHF20 million per year until 2020.
The foreign ministry said the funds are primarily intended to help improve access of Palestinan refugees to education, healthcare and social services.
“In this way Switzerland helps to improve prospects for the future, to reduce the risk of radicalisation among young Palestinians, and to support greater stability in the region,” a statement said.
Since its establishment in 1949, UNRWA has been one of Switzerland’s main multilateral partners in the Middle East.
Pierre Krähenbühl, UNRWA general commissioner since 2014, is Switzerland’s highest ranking UN official.
As a Swiss Abroad, how do you feel about the emergence of more conservative family policies in some US states?
In recent years several US states have adopted more conservative policies on family issues, abortion and education. As a Swiss citizen living there, how do you view this development?
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UN rapporteur calls for action on food crisis
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Jean Ziegler made the appeal as 27 key UN agencies met in the Swiss capital, Bern, on Monday to come up with solutions to ease the escalating global food crisis. Ziegler referred to the situations in the Palestinian territories and Darfur, Sudan, where the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the…
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Switzerland plans to allocate an average of CHF30 million ($31.5 million) a year in aid to the Occupied Palestinian Territory for the 2014-17 period.
Swiss researchers fight cause of African subsistence farmers
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Their greatest successes have been in the battle against two imported enemies of cassava – a shrub with an edible root, which is the main food staple for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers. The first calamity struck in the early 1970s and was comparable to the potato blight, which led to the great famine…
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“The grabbing of agricultural land is really a kind of neo-colonialism,” says Swiss entomologist and agriculturist Hans Rudolf HerrenExternal link, who has been awarded international prizes such as the World Food Prize for his work to stop famine in Africa. “Wealthy states are getting hold of more and more valuable land in the poor countries,…
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