The forestry sector has seen many changes in recent years, leading to a need for adapted management methods. Demands of society and markets are evolving, bioeconomy is increasingly important and new business potential and innovative possibilities are appearing. A Finnish project looked into how to support forest owners in this...

Yam has several nutritional benefits, yet the crop remains neglected and underutilized. In the absence of national research and extension programmes on yam, LIBIRD’s initiative to promote yam cultivation on terrace walls has caught up with the Chepang communities in Nepal.

FAO Regional Office for the Near East and North Africa concludes a two days’ regional consultation in Cairo to discuss the contribution of Livestock to Food Security in the region. The conference gathered 65 Senior Technical Officers representing Near East and North Africa (NENA) Countries, key livestock experts and scientists from...

The seventh meeting of the Working Group on Aquaculture (WGA) of the Regional Commission for Fisheries (RECOFI) was held in Doha, the State of Qatar, from 26 to 28 April 2016 and was attended by the representatives from six Member countries. The WGA reviewed the outcome and recommendations of the...

150 peasants and eaters from 26 countries stretching from Ireland in the West to Georgia in the East and Norway in the North to Greece in the South of Europe came together from 16th to 18th September 2016 in the framework of the 3rd European Meeting of Community Supported Agriculture...

Des travaux existent sur les systèmes herbagers autonomes, voire économes, mais souvent sur des zones géographiques restreintes, difficilement transposables sans adaptation parfois importantes. Ainsi, des monographies d'exploitations économes / autonomes ont été réalisées dans une précédente étude par l'Institut de l'élevage afin de décrire certaines conduites d'exploitation et leurs impacts...

Sustainable agriculture and food systems will play an important role as countries across Europe and Central Asia pursue the new global goals for human society and the planet. An FAO-organized workshop in Budapest this week is discussing the essential connections between sustainable agriculture and food systems on the one hand, and...

FAO’s Liaison Office in Moscow convened a consultation meeting with industry unions yesterday to discuss the feasibility of organizing an inter-sectorial Agricultural Outlook conference in Russian Federation. The meeting hosted top managers of some of the most influential unions representing the interests of the Russian meat, dairy, sugar and grain business....

After spending our summer building labor-intensive hugelkultur mounds, we decided to try our hands at a MUCH simpler form of permaculture, using the Ruth Stout Method: Simply growing our food in hay!

This report is a background brief of current succession processes on family farms in Europe, consisting of data gathered from questionnaires and open interviews, to inform the Farm-Success Project. Family farms represent an important resource throughout Europe, which help reduce unemployment rates, tackle demographic challenges of European farming and maintain and...

On the 30th of June, 2016, Dr Stephan Rist and Mrs Bettina Scharrer, from the Centre for Development and Environment and Dr. Moser, from the Archives of Rural History – both structures within the University of Bern, Switzerland – hosted the first workshop of a project called “The importance of solidarity...

From drones to smart phones, advances in ICT are bridging the extension gap, providing information on climate-smart technologies and practices, and helping to level the playing field by making these technologies more affordable, accessible and applicable for even the poorest smallholder and family farmer.

GRIFORVALOR is a thematic network funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. Its focus is turning waste, by-products and residues from agriculture and forestry into a valuable product or resource for industry through ‘Biomass Innovation Design Hubs’.

This report is the product of field work conducted by ACB and Kusamala Institute for Agriculture and Ecology in Dowa district in central Malawi. The objective of the research was to deepen our understanding of the role of farmer seed varieties in smallholder production systems that have come under heavy...

This paper investigates the empirical linkages between production risk and technology adoption decisions among agricultural farmers in Tanzania and Uganda using a balanced household panel dataset from the World Bank’s LSMS-ISA project. Applying a moment based approach and a MundlakChamberlain IV fixed effects model to control for endogeneity and unobserved...

AEI content is organized into topics and principle-based sets. Topics aggregate site content into central  themes. A principle set includes one principle (a useful distillation of evidence, theory  and/or experience) and supporting evidence, case studies, and relevant  techniques.

FAO reported in 2015 that 490 million people are still suffering chronic hunger in Asia and the Pacific region, which is also home to almost 62 percent of the world’s undernourished. “The challenge facing the region is not only to produce more food from the increasingly limited natural resource base...

This summary report documents the results of the workshop  convened by the African Union Commission    AUC) from 29  June - 01 July 2016 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The workshop was  organized  under  the  theme  “Resilience and adaptation  to  drought conditions and pastoralists systems in Africa” and was attended by  representatives ...

The “Grünbuch Ernährung, Landwirtschaft, Ländliche Räume" defines measures andguidelines for a sustainable policy for food, agriculture and rural areas.

  The main cause of food insecurity for many communal households in Zimbabwe is their reliance upon a form of subsistence-based agriculture which is dependent on a limited range of inputs often poorly suited to local conditions. The current agricultural system prioritizes monocropping and grain yield over other factors of food...