Saopštenje: Obraćanje ministra poljoprivrede i ruralnog razvoja Prof. dr Petra Ivanović u Berlinu povodom učešća na "Globalnom forumu za hranu i poljoprivredu" (GFFA), sajmu poljoprivrede "Zelena nedelja" i Petom samitu ministara poljoprivrede

Dear excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

Allow me to thank you Ms. Aigner, for the invitation and the opportunity to meet you, as well as to meet many of my dear colleagues, coming from over 80 countries.

I am coming from Montenegro, small country with 650.000 people, but the country that declared itself as the first ecological country in the World. For the first time we are actively participating in a such an important dialogue as food security and rural development are.

Being small, we can hardly impress anyone with absolute figures, but we will try to do so with relative, especially „per capita“ figures. Our empasite in agriculture will be on traditional values and quality.

It is important that we are talking about increasing responsible public and private investments in agriculture, as they are needed.

It is also important to recognize that while in the other sector of Montenegrin economy, average wage decline over the last two years, in agriculture it recorded a slight growth. This is good sing for both: farmers and investors.

Still, we need to promote: importance and opportunities that exist in agriculture and rural development.

In order to promote such opportunities, we need not only to better understand critical issues, but to transfer such understanding and knowledge to farmers, investor and public.

That is why we strongly believe that education is extimly important, and if we would make any suggestion in the proposed text of Minister' s Communique that would be to emphasite, a bit stronger, role of education.

We need to go deeper in understanding critical issues and their consequences for our future.

Also, we recognize importance of standards, not only for food security, but for increase of trade and cooperation.

We support proposed text, as well as we support the ideas that we standing behind today's gathering.

We beleive that impact of our meeting will be equaly strong for big and small countries, but also for the change of the mindset related to critical issues in agriculture, and agriculture itself.

Thank you.