As The XIII World Forestry Congress (WFC) will take place in Buenos Aires (Argentina) from 18-23 October 2009. A session on mountains has been recently approved and included in the Congress Programme, and will take place on Friday 23 October. The session will last 1.5 hours and will be in addition to the two mountain side events being organized, one by the Argentinean Committee for Mountains and the other by CONDESAN, which will focus on the Mountain Partnership at global and Andean levels respectively. Also, in the context of the “Forests and Water” sessions, an entire slot will be devoted to watershed management. The new session on mountains will be inserted shortly in the official programme under section 3: “Forests in the service of people”.

As the WFC programme is already covering many issues which are very relevant for mountain areas, the new session will focus on mountain forest products to avoid overlapping and duplication with other sessions, and also because this topic has proven to be of high interest and of high potential to promote sustainable mountain development and fight poverty and hunger, while supporting economic growth and enterprise development in mountain areas.

The following title has been proposed for the session (wording still tentative):

Mountain forests and livelihoods

· quality products from mountain forests

· balancing innovation and tradition for fighting poverty and hunger

· the value chain approach

· the socio-economic and environmental implications

This will allow tapping the experience of a number of key Mountain Partnership members who are actively working in this area, to build on the results of the recent CSD session at the UN and on the up-coming IPROMO course.The session will include three or four presentations of 10-15 minutes each and then allow time for discussion. If you are working in this area and have interesting experiences and results to share with the Congress participants during this session, kindly send to us an abstract of the paper or the full paper if already available. Please submit your abstract; if accepted you will have to provide the full paper by the beginning of August.

For the submission of abstracts, kindly follow the instructions below and include:

· Title.

· Author(s).

· E-mail and mailing addresses of the main author.

· Abstract (minimum 300 words – maximum 400 words).

· Between 3 and 5 keywords.

Texts must be written in one of the three official languages of the Congress (English, French or Spanish). Abstracts submitted in other languages will not be taken into consideration.Abstracts and any requests for further information should be submitted to Rosalaura Romeo by email (rosalaura.romeo@fao.org) or phone (+39 06 5705 5961). This is a great opportunity to feature “Mountains” in a high level international congress and we look forward to receiving your input and possibly seeing you in Buenos Aires! Unfortunately, no funds are available to support travel of participants to the Congress.