Mayor Alemanno,
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests,
Colleagues,

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our IFAD headquarters. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the Honourable Gianni Alemanno, Mayor of Rome, and to the Executive Board Directors and Permanent Representatives here today. I am also happy to see so many of my IFAD colleagues in attendance.

I wish to express my appreciation to our host country, Italy, and to Rome in particular, for its hospitality. While we are relatively new arrivals in this building, the city of Rome has given IFAD a home for more than 30 years now.

Today we are celebrating the one-hundredth session of IFAD’s Executive Board. This is a significant occasion for IFAD because the Board is the engine that drives IFAD’s work. It is where all of the essential decisions that guide our operations are made. 

Mr Mayor, as you know, IFAD is one of the three United Nations Rome-based agencies. We work closely with our sister agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), bringing our separate areas of expertise in order to advance the global community’s goal of improving food security and eliminating poverty and hunger.

But, like all siblings, we have our own, distinct personality. We are distinct in that our focus is, and always has been, the poor people who live in the rural areas of developing countries.

IFAD is also unique in being both a United Nations Agency and an International Financial Institution.

As an International Financial Institution, we fund and mobilize co-financing for projects that invest in and support poor people who live in the rural areas of developing countries.

Since 1978, IFAD has invested over US$12 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering more than 350 million people to break out of poverty.

The projects we support aim to make it possible for poor rural people to lift themselves out of subsistence and into the marketplace.

We do this because our goal is to improve their incomes and to have greater food security. And we know that investing in agricultural development is one of the smartest investments anyone can make if they want to reduce poverty and hunger.

Mr Mayor, as the former minister of agriculture, you know better than most people how well deployed financial resources are key to the effective development of rural areas, and how rural development can lead to economic growth.

Many studies have shown that GDP growth generated by agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors.

Agriculture, no matter how small, is a business, and our business is to make smallholder agriculture a profitable agro-enterprise. 

Because, without business opportunities in rural areas, young people will be forced to look for work in the cities instead of contributing to rural economies. And the world needs young people to be the farmers and the rural entrepreneurs of tomorrow. 

For many poor rural people, lack of access to financial services and credit is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of creating businesses.  Italy has long been a partner in IFAD’s rural finance efforts.  And we are currently looking into ways of working more closely together with partners in the Italian financial sector in order to best provide poor rural people with the financial services they need.

Indeed, at IFAD we are increasingly turning our attention to public-private partnerships. Through such partnerships, IFAD – and the UN more widely – will be able to finance agricultural enterprises to improve sustainable food production and make greater progress towards halving the proportion of people living in poverty and hunger, in keeping with the first Millennium Development Goal.

On a separate note I am very proud to be able to announce to you that our new home has recently been awarded the Gold level certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design Green Building Rating System. This certification was done by an independent third party. It recognises IFAD’s headquarters as a pioneering example of sustainable design and environmental management practices, taking into account: water savings, energy efficiency, material selection and indoor air quality.

I understand that the IFAD headquarters is the first building in all of Italy – and only the third in Europe – to receive this type of certification, so I hope it will be a source of pride for the city of Rome as well as for those of us at IFAD.

Finally, I would like to say that all of us at IFAD look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration with the City of Rome. With the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy approaching next year, I hope we will find an occasion to celebrate together.

Once again, thank you for this visit. And thank you for your continuing support and collaboration.

Rome, 15 September 2010