¿How to plan for the different sections of the meeting?

CPM meetings usually include plenary sessions, regional coordinating meetings, before or after the plenary, or during lunch, meetings of “Friends of the Chair” groups to develop proposal documents, meetings to discuss documents or specific issues and meetings to discuss matters of a technical nature arising outside of the plenary.

All this demonstrates how difficult is to plan participation in all the important sessions and how necessary regional coordination may be. Diligent participation in the CPM meeting always requires intense activity that exceeds ten hours daily. For this reason, it is suggested that sessions of interest be selected in advance, and preparation for participation made, not only in relation to required documents, but also in terms of schedules, and coordination with other delegations. Usually it is only during the first plenary session that dates and schedules for dealing specifically with items on the agenda are made known. This means that planning (almost) fully for your participation may occur only on the first day; additionally there are announcements concerning additional side sessions  everyday . 

Based on this, one of the best ways of planning participation is to coordinate regionally in an effective way to ensure the presence and  position in all sessions which may be relevant to your country and region.

Another very important consideration is that interpretation into other FAO languages is only available in plenary sessions. Othersessions are conducted in English. 

Participation in different sections of the meeting is one of its most complicated aspects, especially for small delegations. It is therefore often necessary to plan how many or which sessions should be attended and to ensure regional coordination to enable participation and adopting of positions in cases where there are side sessions.