The FAO Development Law Service (LEGN) has released a new study, Regulatory options to address food ecommerce in national legislation – Policy and legal challenges, which examines how the rapid rise of food e-commerce has outpaced existing laws, introducing new actors such as online traders and platforms and creating regulatory blind spots around food safety, consumer information and enforcement

The study, prepared by the Development Law Service (LEGN), reviews how relevant international instruments—such as the Codex Alimentarius, World Trade Organization agreements and other global frameworks—apply to the novelty of cell-based foods and precision fermentation production systems and their derived products.

Rome, 18 February 2026. The FAO Development Law Service (LEGN) welcomed Prof. Margaret Young for an in-house seminar dedicated to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. During the sessio...

Rome, 06 February 2026. FAO, through the Development Law Service (LEGN) of its Legal Office, hosted the annual study visit of the Fellows enrolled in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) training programme in Hamburg, Germany, with the support of the Nippon Foundation. This is the fourth time that LEGN, in collaboration with NFIFP, welcomes the Fellows to FAO, one of the selected international institutions for the annual study visit.

09 December 2025 | Rodney Bay, Saint Lucia. The Validation Workshop on Biosafety Legislation was organized by the Department of Sustainable Development of Saint Lucia, in close collaboration with the Food...

Manuela Cuvi, Legal Officer of the FAO Development Law Service, explains how legal assistance to countries in the Latin American and Caribbean Region promotes laws that are more inclusive, sustainable,...

On 1 and 2 October 2025, more than 200 people participated in a dialogue that took place at the Faculty of Law of the University Santiago of Cali, entitled “Justiciability...

The legal platform for sustainable wildlife management, known as the “Legal Hub”, was officially launched in Cameroon on 7 November 2025 during a ceremony organized by FAO and the Cameroon...

Delivered by the Development Law Service (LEGN) and the Fisheries and Aquaculture Division (FI), the workshop on strengthening policy and legal frameworks for the ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF) took place between 2 and 4 December in Accra, Ghana.

Representatives of national minist...

Accra, Ghana. Delivered by the Development Law Service (LEGN) and the Fisheries and Aquaculture Division (FI), the workshop on strengthening policy and legal frameworks for the ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF),...

As FAO celebrates its 80th anniversary, this special edition of the LEGN Magazine reflects on the Organization’s enduring commitment to support its Members in a changing world. From its earliest days, FAO recognised the importance of law in shaping food and agriculture. What began in the early 1950s as the collection and dissemination of national legislative texts on agriculture has, over subsequent decades, grown into a digitalised repository of general and thematic, freely accessible and searchable databases of legislation.

In line with global post-war trends, FAO promoted the increase in agricultural production in order to feed a heavily damaged and hungry world after WWII. Maximum yield levels were the main goal of policy makers and agricultural experts, and national legislation was aimed at supporting this paradigm. In this process, traditional food systems, local and small-scale, were usually overlooked and often damaged as a result of progressive substitution with imported genotypes favoured by industrial agriculture and pervasive monoculture of exotic crops for export and increasingly standardized diets.

FAO has released a new Explanatory Note on the Guidelines for Developing Harmonized Food Safety Legislation for the CCAFRICA Region (CXG 98-2022).  These Guidelines were adopted in 2022 by the FAO/World Health Organization (WHO) Coordinating Committee for Africa (CCAFRICA). This Committee is mandated to exercise general coordination in the preparation of standards relating to the region of Africa.

Mahé, Seychelles. In collaboration with the FAO Development Law Service and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Seychelles Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources organized a hybrid workshop aimed at building capacity on the governance of biosafety, in line with the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CPB) and the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress (NKLSP).

During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, wildlife hunting became a popular pastime among European royals and colonial elites.  As a result, early wildlife laws in the 20th century were primarily designed to regulate sport hunting, and this legacy has endured in national legislation, particularly in several African countries. These laws, however, often overlook the fact that hunting is also a vital means of subsistence and livelihoods for many Indigenous Peoples and rural communities, and that their needs require distinct and appropriate regulations.

Development Law Service's innovative work on the SWM Legal Hub is showcased at an event in the FAO Liaison Office in Brussels, together with the Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme, European Commission’s DG INTPA, and the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS). The event highlighted the SWM Programme’s achievements and its global scaling-up strategy for 2026–2028.