"School meals contribute to greater school retention rates—if food is guaranteed in the schools, parents let children carry on with their studies rather than begin work."   With FAO support, Brazil’s Zero Hunger Initiative was launched 15 years ago with two parallel strategies to fight hunger both in the short and long term. These comprised an emergency response to provide food for the hungry, and a longer-term strategy to improve professional training, reduce poverty and stimulate food production. Today, the FAO programme ‘Strengthening School Feeding Programmes in the Framework of the Zero Hunger Initiative in Latin America...

Fruits and vegetables make a significant contribution to food security, nutrition and poverty reduction, as well as to generating economic development in South Asian countries. However, poor quality, questionable safety and high levels of post-harvest losses are major bottlenecks faced in traditional fruit and vegetable supply chains in the region. The project aimed to pilot the implementation of good post-harvest management practices to manage quality, assure safety and reduce losses in prioritized traditional fruit and vegetable supply chains with stakeholders, in order to generate evidence to support the uptake of the improved practices.

In the village of Saal, located on the banks of the Gambia River in the Tambacounda region of Senegal, banana farmer Veronique wakes up at dawn each morning to make her way to the plantation. Around noon, she returns home to cook lunch for her family and then heads back to work until it’s time again to prepare dinner, clean the house, and spend time with her husband. A new irrigation system would lessen her back-breaking load on the plantation, and, most importantly, would give her more time to take care of her family and start a vegetable garden to...

"There’s always a right path for development. You just need to stop and think, and work very hard." Artur, a fisher and rural council member from Toktogul, a city in the Jalal-Abad Region of Kyrgyzstan The project strengthened the right to food and enhanced livelihoods and employment opportunities among the rural poor in Kyrgyzstan.  Artur comes from Toktogul, a city in the Jalal-Abad Region of Kyrgyzstan located on the northern shore of the Toktogul reservoir. After high school, Artur, like many of his village friends, began to fish for a living. In this remote area with...