Peres launches Indo-Israeli-Australian Food and Water project

The project, a “track-2” non-governmental trilateral cooperation between India, Israel and Australia, is being carried out by Pratt Industries (on the Australian side); Ananta Centre (on the Indian side); Tel Aviv University and the Peres Centre of Peace (on the Israeli side).

In order to provide more food and clean water, both for drinking and irrigation, Anthony Pratt, Chairman and CEO of Pratt Industries said, " Pratt foundation is planning to focus on India in order to promote and make the food chain more efficient."

Jamshyd Godrej, Chairman, Ananta Centre said, " The cooperation with Israel and Australia can further promote the Green Agriculture Revolution declared by the Indian Prime Minister and today we are laying the corner stone in this important initiative in this respect."

Peres shared his views on yesterday’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said that Mr. Modi is leading the 3rd Indian revolution, in the footsteps of the spiritual revolution led by Mahatma Gandhi and the pragmatic revolution that was followed by Jawahar Lal Nehru.

Elaborating on their meeting, Peres went on saying that he found in PM Modi a World Leader, a true partner confronting global challenges, and a friend of Israel.

Peres added, "Israel is a world leader in advanced agriculture and water solutions, which is based on high technology. Israel's lack of natural resources including water and land, forced us to base our development on the only resource that we had – The Human Resource. Like Israel, India is also lacking of clean water and land and like Israel, not lacking of the human resource."

Peres also mentioned that Israel’s success story is not a miracle but rather a combination of hard work, creative thinking and courage, all of which we are willing to share with our friendly countries like India.

"Our two countries share deep friendly relations and the goal of this project is to introduce better technologies to the wide agriculture sector of India. Together with our partners, we will do our utmost to bring the best companies with the best technologies from the three partner countries in the field of water and food security for the benefit of Indian farmers."

Peres also emphasized that technology is the most recent revolution in the world history, and the most candid one, as unlike the previous ones,  it does not kill or arrest anyone and is at its beginning phase. The next phase of agriculture and water solutions will be based on that revolution and Israel, India and Australia are perfect partners to lead this phase in India, he said.

India and Israel are already engaged in a bilateral, governmental agriculture cooperation, between India’s NHM and Israel’s Mashav, with 28 Centres of Excellence for the transfer of Agricultural technology, in more than 10 states.