FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva

José Graziano da Silva of Brazil was elected Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in June 2011, taking up the post on 1 January 2012.

FAO Director General – first term (2012-2015)

At the helm of FAO, Graziano da Silva reinforced the commitment to transform the vision of a sustainable and food-secure world into reality. During his first term, he carried out transformative changes within the organization by intensifying the focus of FAO's work on five strategic objectives: (i) ensuring food security; ii) promoting the production and sustainable use of natural resources; (iii) reducing rural poverty; iv) improving food systems and v) strengthening resilience.

At the same time, he conducted an internal reform of the UN agency by reducing bureaucracy and administrative costs; developed partnerships with various stakeholders, including civil society, private sector, academic and research institutions and foundation, and boosted FAO's capacity to support South-South cooperation - the exchange of resources, technology, and knowledge between developing countries. Through these changes, Graziano da Silva helped to make FAO a knowledge organization with its “feet on the ground” by reinforcing the technical capacity of its field work.

Graziano da Silva was also instrumental strengthening the member states’ confidence in FAO by reinforcing the organization’s “value-for-money” approach. This can be attested by the broad consensus reached-in approving successive FAO budgets and programmes of work. He also strengthened FAO’s global mandate by actively supporting the Committee on World Food Security, the United Nations High-Level Task Force on Combating the World Food Crisis - of which he served as vice-president - and the UN Secretary-General's Zero Hunger Challenge (2012-2015), which was inspired by in the Brazilian program Fome Zero. In addition, also through his work with the African Union, as FAO Director-General he was instrumental in ensuring the political commitment of African leaders to the eradication of hunger by 2025.

FAO Director General – second term (2015-2019)

In 2015, as the only candidate for the post, Graziano da Silva was re-elected Director-General of FAO for a second four-year term (until 2019), with a historic turnout (177 votes, one against).

In that same year, in New York, the Brazilian Zero Hunger approach became the model of one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-2) which calls for the eradication of hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030.

José Graziano da Silva subsequently consolidated many of the initiatives launched during his first term, in partnership with member countries and international organizations, with UN agencies, and with the academia, the civil society and the private sector.

Among the most notable achievements, Graziano da Silva shaped FAO’s crucial contribution to most of the key development challenges, including:

a) Reinforcing rural poverty as a root cause for forced migration;

b) Highlighting hunger as one essential precondition for conflict, a vision adopted by the UN Security Council in 2018;

c) Promoting a new approach to facilitate agriculture adaptation and to improve resilience as part of the mitigation for climate change impacts;

d) Highlighting biodiversity loss as a very serious threat for global food and agriculture;

e) Bringing the themes of two 2014 initiatives the UN International Year of Farming and the Second FAO-WHO International Conference on nutrituion to the top of the UN system agenda, as manifested by the declaration of the Decades of Nutrition (2016-2025) and Family Farming (2019-2028);

f) Highlighting the role of food safety as a key concern for food security, and for trade;

g) Reinforcing the view of a globalization of the obesity epidemic and the need to promote sustainable food systems that can foster healthy diets, as well as the necessity of a global regulation for food production and consumption.

For more information: www.fao.org/about/director-gen/en/