BEIRUT, March 2 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese caretaker Agriculture Minister Abbas Hajj Hassan on Thursday called for boosting partnerships among Arab countries to achieve agricultural security.
"We call for an Arab partnership to ensure Arab agricultural security, and from the gate of food security, we call for Arab rapprochement where we can achieve in agriculture what we failed to achieve in politics," the National News Agency quoted Hassan as saying.
He made the remarks during an event in Beirut to launch the farmers' registry. The event, which was held by the agriculture ministry in cooperation with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aims at promoting agricultural development and protecting the country's food security in light of food security threats and Lebanon's financial crisis.
Hassan said the project, which is funded by the European Union, aims to register people practicing agricultural work and targets, in the first stage, 50,000 farmers across Lebanon.
"The registry will provide us with accurate knowledge of all the details in the agricultural sector, the cultivated areas, and the quality of the crops, and thus improve our ability to determine the quantities of production ... and match needs with capabilities," he said.
For her part, Nora Ourabah Haddad, FAO Representative in Lebanon, said the register will constitute a reference for the development and organization of the agricultural sector and will be used to manage the data of about 170,000 farmers in Lebanon. ■
