Just a few days before Stop Food Waste Day on 30 April, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has successfully delivered the first regional edition of a virtual learning course on tackling food loss and waste (FLW). Developed in collaboration with the International Food Waste Coalition (now part of the Waste and Resources Action Programme Europe) and hosted on FAO’s Virtual Learning Center, the course offered a hands-on, practical training experience tailored for key actors in the region’s agrifood value chains and systems.

Just a few years ago, registering of land or changes in property rights, such as an inheritance or a purchase, was a time-consuming and often costly process in Serbia. It would take months to register a transaction. Data were fragmented, unreliable and not easily accessible, often available only in analogue archives. The process of obtaining the documents to prove someone’s land rights usually required several visits to the cadastre offices, which could be in another village.

National food control systems, in line with internationally recognized food safety and quality standards, are a cornerstone of ensuring the safety and quality of the food we put on our tables. Recognizing this priority, the Republic of Belarus has requested support from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to facilitate a self-assessment by using the Food Control System Assessment Tool (FCSAT), developed by FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Mountain regions especially in the world’s developing countries face growing pressure from climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation, yet mountain communities have great potential for climate-resilient development and work to upgrade mountain products sectors such as organic food, textiles and tourism services is already paying off, QU Dongyu, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) said here today.   

The AgriTech Observatory, an initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for countries in Europe and Central Asia, has been officially recognized as a Digital Public Good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance—a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the United Nations to promote open-source technologies that accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Today is Earth Day, a time to reflect on and to take local actions to safeguard the land and the environments that sustain all life. We each play a part and all efforts for sustainability are worthwhile. In Adaköy, a village in the Yeniçağa district of Bolu, Kamil Yıldız farms in the quiet embrace of nature. Kamil leases idle fields in the village, cultivating a total of 300 decares of land. To sustain the family farm, he grows wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, forage peas and silage maize. Most of these crops are used as animal feed, except for wheat, which he sells.

The war in Ukraine continues inflicting pressure on the agricultural sector, making it increasingly difficult for farmers and rural families to continue food production and sustain their livelihoods. In response, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched a two-year Emergency and Early Recovery Response Plan (EERRP) 2025–2026, designed to support over half a million vulnerable people in restoring agricultural production, protecting livelihoods and building long-term resilience. 

Within its ongoing efforts to strengthen Tajikistan's agricultural sector, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has successfully completed a Technical Cooperation Programme Facility project on cooperative development and to strengthen rural institutions under the national Agrarian Reform Programme. The FAO project helped improve the working environment of cooperatives and strengthened the capacity of national authorities to support the development of cooperatives and rural institutions. On a local level, the project supported four agricultural cooperatives.

In 2022, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) began supporting the Ministry of Agriculture of Turkmenistan and its Land Resources Service in modernizing and digitalizing the country’s land cadastre through the technical cooperation project “Support to the establishment of a Digital Land Cadastre”. This project is now concluding. A meeting was held 9 April in Ashgabat to mark the finalization of the project, recap the achievements and look to future actions to continue improving the digital cadastre system.

Living amidst grapevines that have been around since the time of his ancestors, it is no wonder Givi Chubinidze became convinced to follow in their footsteps. Here in the green valleys of Georgia’s Imereti region, bordered by the Likhi mountain range, endemic blue and purple grape varieties, such as tsitska, krakhuna and adanasuri, have been a part of the local landscape and cultural heritage for centuries.