THE United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to finance a programme that will make it possible to hire international professionals to work with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) in an associate capacity. The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the United States Department of Agriculture has signed an agreement with IICA under which the FAS is to finance the hiring of international professionals who will provide their services in IICA.

According to a statement from the IICA office in Washington, the signing of the agreement marked the establishment of the Associate Professional Officer (APO) Programme. The FAS and IICA believe this programme will help promote the development of a viable and sustainable agricultural system in the Americas.

IICA’s Director General, Víctor M. Villalobos, on thanking the USDA for this important initiative, noted that the agreement is a further expression of the United States’ support for the Institute, an agency of the Inter-American System specializing in agriculture.

“The United States regards us as a valuable partner and has offered its support to enable us to contract highly qualified personnel to work on behalf of sustainable agriculture in the Americas,” he said.

The agreement was signed within the framework of the General Agreement for Cooperation between the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and IICA, which dates from June 2000.

The FAS will be making an initial disbursement of US$300,000 to fund the programme. The positions funded under the APO Programme must be in keeping with the objectives of IICA, its Strategic Plan, and its Medium-term Plan.

The strategic issues on which IICA focuses are innovation for productivity and competitiveness, agricultural health and food safety, agribusiness and commercialization, and agriculture, territories and rural well-being.
The Institute also has two programmes that cut across the other four programmes: one specializing in agriculture and food security, and the other focusing on agriculture, natural resource management and climate change.