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El Niño, which swept the Philippines from 2015 to 2016, had a significant impact on agricultural production and food security. The project aimed to restore agriculture-based livelihoods of drought-affected farmers in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and the Region XII, where a state of calamity was declared in four provinces. The project provided relevant agricultural inputs to the most affected and most vulnerable farm households and technical assistance through capacity building  of the relevant institutions, extension workers and farmers in building resilience to shocks, effective drought management and more robust monitoring and forecasting systems. Find more Project Highlights here.

This study reviewed the achievements, and also the shortcomings, of 12 watershed management projects technically supported by FAO over the past decade, with a view to learning from experience. Unlike sectoral development approaches, watershed management involves examining the interactions among various natural processes and land uses and managing land, water and the wider ecosystem of the watershed in an integrated way. Watershed management is best carried out as a stepwise multistakeholder process. The review identified a sequence of steps that watershed management projects or programmes should ideally follow. The approach has demonstrated its effectiveness for responding to global challenges of [...]

This paper, now also available in Chinese, explores the intra-industry trade in ethanol between the United States and Brazil, highlighting the lack of policy alignment and suggesting a “book and claim” system to cater to differing national objectives. See here all FAO Agricultural Development Economics Working Papers.

This brief summarizes FAO’s analysis of NDCs and provides an overview of how the Organization, through policy processes, capacity development and technical interventions on the ground, supports the implementation of NDCs in the agriculture sectors. 

This report captures the State of Food Security and Nutrition in Africa. The Official annual Regional Panorama for Africa In sub-Saharan Africa good progress was made in reducing hunger until 2010, after which time the decline in the prevalence of undernourishment came to a halt and then rose to 22.7 percent in 2016, while the number of undernourished rose to 224.3 million. In many countries, the worsening situation in 2015 and 2016 can be attributed to adverse climatic conditions, often linked to the El Niño phenomenon, resulting in poor harvests and threatening livestock populations. Conflict, sometimes in combination with drought [...]

This book defines land concentration, accumulation, land-grabbing and foreign ownership in Colombia. It identifies risks related to large-scale investments in rural land and makes public policy recommendations, such as conducting risk-based analysis. Only available in Spanish.

Strong market interventions and regulations of agricultural products have been part of the import substitution strategy implemented by the previous government until 2015, when the new administration reversed it by opening the market. Throughout the review period (2007-2017), the country prioritized social spending through various programmes, all of which were sustained by the new administration.

During the period 2007-2017, Nigeria’s agriculture sector has undergone major reforms. The introduction of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) reformed the input delivery system, strengthened famers’ resilience to shocks and enhanced agricultural credit. In 2016, the government launched the Social Investment programme which aims at strengthening school feeding, conditional cash transfers and food bio-fortification programmes. 

During the period 2007-2016, the government’s main policies for the agricultural sector have focused on increasing domestic rice production, reforming the cotton sector and maintaining input subsidies programmes. With regards to consumer policies, the main forms of assistance include food distribution, food sales at subsidized prices, and ad hoc measures to stabilize food prices such as the closure of the border for food exports or the waiver of import duties on imported foods.

In recent years, government's investments in agriculture have focused on increasing land under irrigation, subsidizing inputs, strengthening the agricultural extension service and reforming agricultural sector institutions through the privatization of a number of parastatals. Although agriculture represents the largest contributor to Kenya's GDP, the allocation of public expenditure to the sector has remained below the five percent over the past decade.