Distinguished Chair,
Mr. President,
Fellow Governors,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen

This annual meeting of the Governing Council takes place at an important moment for the future of IFAD – right before the beginning of the new round of replenishment negotiations. The last replenishment was marked by the global food crisis, and now again food prices have risen to a record level. For German development cooperation, food security and rural development are a top priority.

We think that IFAD is doing very good work in supporting smallholder agriculture and fighting rural poverty. IFAD has a unique role in the international development architecture as an advocate of small scale farmers. The rural poverty report impressively demonstrates IFAD’s competence in this field.

Supporting smallholder agriculture and empowering the rural poor is the core mandate of IFAD. We encourage IFAD to continue to concentrate on this comparative advantage. The internal aid architecture should be built on clearly defined mandates and a clear division of labour between the different organisations. This is a precondition for high development effectiveness and cost efficiency.

We welcome all innovations that IFAD may propose – for example more private sector involvement – as long as they focus on IFAD’s core mandate.

Development effectiveness and cost efficiency are of key importance to us. Therefore, we cannot support a real increase in the administrative budget as high as 5,4%. We appreciate management’s efforts to concentrate spending on operations to ensure a high quality for the rising programme of work, but we think that IFAD’s cost efficiency should be improved further.

Last year we encouraged IFAD to present a comprehensive concept for the new organisational structure for discussion in the Executive Board. We regret that this was not the case and that the process of restructuring as again not fully transparent. Therefore we would like to ask IFAD to improve its communication, in particular in view of the upcoming human resource reform.

To conclude, I want to stress that Germany will continue to be a reliable partner for IFAD. We think that IFAD plays an important role in the international aid architecture, and we will support it to be a well focused, transparent, highly effective and cost-efficient organisation.

Thank you very much for your attention.

19 February 2011