Senior Agricultural Officer

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Description

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The Senior Agricultural Officer (Team Leader) will lead the Crop and Mechanization Systems Team (NSPLD), one of the six teams that make up NSP. NSPLD contributes to NSP’s overarching goal of fostering resilient and sustainable plant production and protection systems that produce more with less. The team leads efforts to develop, validate and promote the adoption of context-specific, modern agronomic practices with sustainable agriculture mechanization as an integral part that sustainably enhance the productivity, efficiency and resilience of diverse cropping systems. The position is located in the Plant Production and Protection Division (NSP) in FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy.

Key Functions

• Plans, manages, or leads highly specialized or multidisciplinary teams, leads, coordinates, and/or participates on Organization-wide, cross-divisional committees, project teams, and working groups, and/or provides technical leadership/secretariat services on technical networks and/or international technical policy and standard setting bodies.
• Analyses global and country specific requirements and relevant technical issues to provide critical input into the FAO Strategic Framework, Programme of Work, work plans and the supporting budgets and/or resourcing strategies.
• Implements and monitors programmes of work involving the development of the approach, evidence-based strategies and related tools, methodologies and the supporting system/database, monitoring and reporting frameworks.
• Conducts, designs and oversees research and analysis of activities to support the development of technical standards, international instruments, innovation, technical reports, publications and/or on-going programme development as well as the provision of technical and/or policy advisory services.
• Provides technical and policy advisory services to Members and technical support to Decentralized Offices in the development and implementation of their programmes of work.
• Leads and/or collaborates in, provides technical backstopping to and ensures the quality/effectiveness of capacity development and knowledge sharing activities within Members such as policy support, organizational development and individual learning events including preparation of related information, learning materials, on-line tools.
• Represents the Organization at international/inter-governmental meetings and conferences, advocates strategic partnerships, best practices and increased policy dialogue and develops and negotiates effective working relationships/consensus and agreements with international and national partners.
• Leads or participates in resource mobilization activities in accordance with the FAO Strategic Framework.
• Leads the development of interventions that use modern crop production and protection systems to address Members’ development needs relating, in particular, to climate change adaptation and mitigation; nutrition outcomes; and overall input use-efficiency.
• Promotes the use of modern agriculture technologies e.g. drones, remote sensors, artificial intelligence, digitalization, information technology, etc. that are context-sensitive to enhance the productivity and resilience of cropping systems while promoting sustainable agricultural mechanization and efficient soil fertility and moisture management.
• Provides technical, capacity strengthening and policy support to Members to respond to their cropping systems’ needs and enables them to adopt sustainable agricultural production and protection practices in rural, urban and peri-urban settings.

Minimum Requirements:

• Advanced university degree in agronomy, crop science, soil science, sustainable agriculture mechanization or related fields.
• Ten years of relevant experience with public or private sector institutions, international organizations with an emphasis on cropping systems agronomy, preferably with a focus on developing countries.
• Working knowledge (proficiency – level C) of English and intermediate knowledge (intermediate proficiency – level B) of another official FAO language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish).

Source: https://jobs.fao.org/careersection/fao_external/jobdetail.ftl?job=2501102

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