Shaza R. Omar

Phytosanitary Specialist and PCE Facilitator at FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Speaker

Senior International Development Advisor and IPPC PCE Facilitator, FAORAP

Shaza Roushdy Omar is a senior international agricultural policy and phytosanitary expert with 20 years of experience delivering regulatory advisory, institutional strengthening, and strategic planning for governments and international organizations across the Near East, Africa, and Asia.

Currently serving as Agricultural Policy Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), she leads plant health and phytosanitary policy initiatives across Asia-Pacific member countries in close partnership with national governments and plant protection authorities.

A certified FAO-IPPC Phytosanitary Capacity Evaluation (PCE) Facilitator, Shaza has directed national capacity assessments and institutional development programmes across multiple countries in the Near East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. She previously served as Vice-Chair of the IPPC Standards Committee representing Near East countries and has represented Egypt at the WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Committee in Geneva.

Prior to her UN career, Shaza held senior roles at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service and Egypt's Ministry of Agriculture, where she led phytosanitary policy, bilateral trade negotiations, and regulatory reform.

She is co-founder of ArabPhyto — the Arab Network for Plant Health — and holds a Master of Science in Rural Sociology and a Bachelor of Science in International Agriculture from Cairo University.