A EU task force for rural Africa has been launched in Brussels today: the task of this 11-people expert committee will be to provide advice and support to the partners of the African Union Commission on agriculture and the food industry, considering that such industry takes up “75% of African labour, but accounts for less than 33% of the continent’s GDP”, as pointed out by the EU Agriculture Commissioner, Phil Hogan, as he opened the first meeting with his African Commissioner counterpart, Josefa Leonel Correa Sacko. In Brussels these days there are all the AU Committee members for the yearly meeting of the two commissions, which took place yesterday and was chaired by the two presidents, Jean-Claude Juncker and Moussa Faki Mahamat. Consistently with the EU-AU summit held in Abidjan in November 2017, the two Commissions established “measures for effective initiatives” to deal with “urgent global issues”, in areas such as peace and security, migration, job creation and farming. The EU launched Phase two of the “Pan-African programme” (2018-2020), which contains continental or interregional projects in support of UA-EU dialogue and AU institutions in areas such as the fight against corruption and human rights. As to young people, there will be a student exchange programme, very similar to Erasmus, and a project for the recognition and standardisation of high-school diplomas in Africa, as well as measures in support of youth employment; the programme includes measures for greater continent-wide economic integration in Africa and a “memorandum of understanding about peace and security”, which will be “the main tool to join forces and face the challenges against peace and security as well as the strategic responses”.