The countries of the Visegrád Group (V4) and Israel signed a declaration of intent on innovation cooperating in Jerusalem on Monday. During the meeting, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Parliamentary State Secretary Levente Magyar also held negotiations on tightening Hungarian-Israeli bilateral relations.

In a statement to Hungarian news agency MTI, Mr. Magyar stressed that thanks to the development of political relations, the situation is ripe to not only enable the relationship between the two countries to be ordered and free of conflict, but also for the development of closer, forward looking economic cooperation that can be measured in numbers, and partnership relations involving other fields.

“I was last in Israel exactly a year ago, when I held talks on similar topics, but one of the major differences compared to my visit last year is that there is now a much wider framework available for the further development of our relations with Israel, the framework provided by the countries of the Visegrád Group”, the State Secretary added.

He indicated that an intensive V4 dialogue had begun, one of the engines of which, or “the” engine of which, is Hungary.

Based on the declaration of intent we signed on Monday, cooperation can be extended to all fields in which the parties recognise a mutual interest, and as an example Mr. Magyar pointed to agricultural innovation as one of the most promising fields of this kind. For this reason, the first stop on the State Secretary’s two-day visit was the “citadel” of Israeli agricultural research, the Volcani agricultural research institute.

“Hungary and Israel face similar challenges with relation to agriculture, and especially climate change thanks to increasingly hot summers, for which the right solutions can only be found through conscious strategic planning”, he said. Mr. Magyar pointed out that Israeli agricultural innovation is world famous, including within the fields of irrigation and greenhouse technologies, and could also provide useful solutions for Hungary. “This is also particularly important in view of the fact that agriculture is one of the strategic sectors of the Hungarian economy with relation to which one of the important tasks for the upcoming years is to increase added value and keep it in Hungary, and this requires precisely the kind of intensive technological investments that exist in Israel”, he noted.

In addition to the signing of the declaration of intent, the Hungarian party is also drawing up a Hungarian-Israeli working plan, delineating possible areas of cooperation with concrete projects. “We are planning joint projects and will be purchasing this know-how partly within a state/inter-state framework and partly on a market basis because there is a need for it, for instance in view of the increasing shortage of labour”, he said, citing as an example the fact that Israel is working on robot technologies that could already provide a solution to this problem in the short term. The State Secretary said that in his view science-based cooperation could also come about in the interest of restoring Hungary’s berry industry, which has been particularly badly hit by increasingly hot summers.

In addition, bilateral cooperation also provides an opportunity for defence partnership, including within the fields of cyber defence, the mutual sharing of information in the interests of counter-terrorism, the exchange of experience and training.

“The political frameworks are given, there are already economic results, and we are striving to deepen our partnership in further areas”, Mr. Magyar stressed, citing as examples education, inter-university cooperation, and innovation, and announcing that Hungary is also preparing to make significant headway with relation to the production of kosher foods.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)