Distinguished Chair,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a pleasure to participate in this panel and address such a representative audience in environmentally-friendly Heiligenblut.
I am honoured to represent today CICA or the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, which provides a multilateral platform for ensuring peace, security and stability in Asia. CICA brings together 28 Member States, which cover 90% of Asia's territory and comprise half of the world’s population.
As a multilateral platform, CICA offers an equal opportunity for its Members with varying political, economic, and socio-cultural backgrounds to discuss ideas, share knowledge and best practices, collaborate on beneficial initiatives within five broad dimensions: military-political, economic, environmental, human, and new challenges and threats. A comprehensive list of all areas of cooperation within these five dimensions is contained in the CICA Catalogue of Confidence Building Measures, which serves as a basis for CICA specific actions and practical activities.
Ensuring food security is one of the priorities for the CICA region. This issue was discussed by the participants of the Fifth Plenary Session of the CICA Business Council and the Seventh CICA Business Forum, held on 27 June 2022 in Astana. The Business Council is one of four specialized permanent advisory bodies of CICA uniting representatives of business organizations and public authorities for economic cooperation in the field of small and medium enterprises, trade facilitation, investment cooperation and other areas.
Participants of these meetings of the Business Council and Business Forum addressed issues of maintaining food security, digitalization of the agricultural sector, discussed common challenges, solutions, perspectives, proposals, and adaptation of CICA activities to the changing realities of Asia. The agenda of the upcoming plenary session of the CICA Business Council and Business Forum scheduled for early October 2023 in Almaty covers food security, renewable energy, and green finance.
The CICA region faces a variety of climatic phenomena, such as floods, cyclones, desertification, water scarcity, air pollution, earthquakes, heat waves, and so on. The year 2022 has proven how fragile Asia is against environmental disasters. Climate migration and food insecurity problems have come up after all the extreme disasters. These prove to us that environmental sustainability in Asia is urgently needed.
In order to combat, prevent and mitigate all these challenges, the Member States hold different events on green transformation, regional environmental problems, circular economy, sustainable development and disaster risk reduction under the CICA environmental dimension. Sustainable development, environment protection and natural disaster management are the priority areas of this dimension.
The CICA economic dimension has eight priority areas, and one of them is agriculture. Member States continuously share their experiences, best practices and cooperate in agricultural development. Agricultural cooperation is an important component of CICA confidence building measures. CICA Member States are rich in agricultural resources and have a high potential for agricultural development. The food security topic enjoys very high interest among the Members.
As the coordinator country of the agriculture priority area, China has organized a number of seminars, online training sessions and workshops on agriculture industry development and poverty reduction, focusing on smart production technology and food security. In particular, China hosted a series of training courses on “Development and Application of Smart Agronomy”, which brought together more than 950 participants from CICA Member States. The course included topics such as high-tech crop production, animal husbandry, smart agriculture, production of important staple foods for states with a high population density, preserving soil fertility under intensive exploitation, big data management techniques in agronomy, and the benefits of using drones to monitor large agricultural areas. Under the auspices of these training courses, Huazhong Agricultural University hosted the CICA Smart Agriculture Application and Development Seminar in May 2021. China also held a two-week online training programme on “Agricultural Industry Development and Poverty Reduction” in May 2023, focused on building an understanding of modern technology in the agro-industry and catalyzing a stronger, deeper, and more collaborative response among CICA countries to alleviate poverty through cooperation in the agriculture sector.
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
In 2022, the main political event of CICA to culminate the 30th anniversary of our forum was the Sixth CICA Summit held on 12-13 October in Astana. The main decision of our heads of state and government was the launch of CICA’s transformation into a full-fledged regional international organization. The Summit has established the CICA Fund to facilitate CICA project activities, adopted the CICA action plan to implement the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the statement on cooperation in the area of security of and in the use of ICTs, and other significant decisions.
At this Summit meeting, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev put forward several initiatives to further strengthen cooperation in the environmental dimension, which include holding a High-level Environmental Conference in Astana in 2024 to identify environmental issues and develop coordinated solutions under the auspices of CICA.
In line with this goal, we will organize a series of CICA expert meetings under the CICA Chairmanship of Kazakhstan with the participation of 28 Member States in the run-up to the Conference. The purpose is to examine and understand the Members' environmental perspectives, current topics, mitigation and adaptation practices and to prepare the necessary high-level documents for the Conference.
Among the expected outcomes of the Conference is the decision to establish the CICA Environmental Council, to develop common green transformation policies of the Member States, to discuss the creation of a potential CICA carbon market and how to create a sustainable environment in the region.
Dear participants,
In closing, I would like to inform you that since 2021, every year for sustainable development and environmental awareness, the CICA Secretariat has a tradition of planting trees at the CICA Alley at the Presidential Park of Astana. It is expected that this green tradition will spread to the capitals of all CICA Member States. Another eco-friendly tradition is the CICA Bicycle Tour held every year on 3 June -to celebrate the World Bicycle Day and promote the Sustainable Development Goals.
I thank you.
16 June 2023
