World Food Week (part 1)

Buon giorno!

For all of you who didn’t Google search “FAO, food” after reading the last blog, last Tuesday was World Food Day. Well in fact, since the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN is headquartered here in Rome, it was more like World Food Week, since the festivities officially ended this Monday night. But it is only proper to start at the beginning…

Last Tuesday, officially recognized by over 150 countries as World Food Day, began with a celebration in the FAO’s plenary hall, the room where all the countries meet to discuss political matters. For me, attending the ceremony was like sitting on Santa’s lap. It was all I could do to not fidget and be giddy. Aside from seeing and hearing from FAO’s Director-General Jacques Diouf, German President Horst Köhler and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete addressed the assembly as well. Parts of me were aggravated by the latter’s speech, who strongly supported this year’s theme “The Right to Food” while he is kicking people out of his country and into Rwanda and Burundi, though I am sure only a few people in the room knew. And though I was aggravated, I was not surprised that he did not practice his own preaching (this is politics after all). I was surprised though by a delegate from Tanzania who sat next to me; he started snoring in the middle of his own president’s speech!
After the ceremony, my supervisor asked me to stay for another meeting addressing civil society’s role in “the Right to Food,” and being the nerd that I am, I excitedly obliged. When I finished taking notes there, I went into the FAO atrium, which was filled with free literature regarding “the Right to Food,” World Food Day and specific FAO issues and topics. So naturally I amassed my own mini-library and took it back to my room.

Nothing actually happened Wednesday, so for the sake of your time, I am just going to skip over it. Essentially, I caught up from all the work I missed the day before.

However, Thursday is a day to note. It began with the press conference of a new independent evaluation of the FAO, which will be the main debate in its upcoming bi-annual budgetary meeting in November. The controversy is that the report states that while the FAO is a necessary organization, it needs to undergo extreme reforms to make it sustainable. My supervisor and I, being in charge of Public Affairs, attended the press conference to hand out our initial response to the finalized report. As we should, we strongly support the evaluation and its recommendations and hope to work with other countries to make the evaluation’s recommendations a reality. Not all countries share our view though, so we were interested to see whether the press would put the new report and our response to it a positive or negative story. My supervisor put me in charge of checking that first thing Friday morning.

After the press conference and another day of Run-for-Food preparations, including a memo to the Ambassador, I was honored with an invitation to our Deputy Chief of Mission’s (DCM) residence for dinner. By the way, in the common tongue, a DCM is second to an ambassador, but whereas an ambassador is politically appointed, the DCM is a high-level Foreign Service officer in the State Department. Anyways, it was a beautiful house overlooking Rome. The meal itself was high-class, more than I would afford elsewhere, and the conversation with the hosts and other guests was refreshingly laid-back. The best part of the evening though, was none of the above, but an amazing spectacle brought to us by swallows. Over one of Rome’s tallest monuments, literally thousands of swallows formed moving shapes in the sky. Some were dark clusters, like tornados, and others were wide and abstract, like the northern lights. All of us agreed in a moment of communal astonishment that it was truly one of the miracles of nature.
I was the first USUN employee to arrive at the office Friday morning, which surprised the guards that waited outside. Because there is a series a security locks and codes that neither of us knew, we had to wait for someone to arrive. As soon as I got in I was looking for new articles on the FAO report. Sure enough, there were five, four by the Associated Press and one in Reuters. All five were positive, and the three in the most popular sources (Reuters, International Herald Tribune and USA Today) even quoted the US initial response that we handed out. Before my supervisor arrived, I had emailed all the articles with a short summary to all USUN employees and printed out copies with highlights for her. The DCM (remember from above) was especially pleased, telling us that when someone asked him at a meeting what our position was, he would answer “look it up in the paper.” Pat on the back; job well done.

The rest of the day though was rough as I finished up preparations for the Run-for-Food. This included traveling across town by Metro to pick up thirty-five t-shirts and then go about distributed them. To make matters more irritating, I had about five people ask me if they could sign-up then, even though I had been advertising this for three weeks. Of course, I would politely tell them “no” and advise them to sign-up on the day of the race, which was Sunday. I started my weekend at work once again, making sure everything was in order, knowing that once I left, I would have no control over the Run-for-Food until Sunday morning. And in the Foreign Service world, that one day can make all of the difference.

I have written enough for the today though. As you title states, this is only Part 1. But do not worry, all of your questions and concerns will be answered in the next exciting edition of my blog, appropriately titled “World Food Week (part 2)”.

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Thank you for reading. God bless.