Women farmers grow, buy, sell, cook food and feed their children. They produce 60 – 80%1 of food in most developing countries and, as such, it is women that hold the key to tackling hunger and malnutrition. Yet their needs are often not recognised or understood. As a result, policy...

Esta Guía tiene por objeto posibilitar a técnicos vinculados al sector, el cálculo, diseño e instalación de pequeños sistemas de riego.

This Working Document provides practical guidelines for upgrading agricultural retail markets in rural areas and analyses the strategic potential of upgrading as an important component of rural development. This document presents methodological steps for the design and implementation of appropriate programmes, rather than a single model to replicate. The objective is to propose...

Today, the spectre of hunger has returned to many developing countries. The number of undernourished people has risen above one billion, or one sixth of humanity. The international community faces other daunting challenges, including the global economic downturn, plummeting levels of trade and investment, growing scarcity of natural resources, and the...

El presente estudio pone de relieve las trabas existentes para una mayor incorporación de las mujeres al mundo del trabajo: una estructura productiva que no crea suficientes empleos de buena calidad para ellas –y tampoco para los hombres– y una población femenina envejecida y con muy bajos niveles de calificación....

Ongoing violent conflicts accentuate the challenges that women and men face in the rural areas of Iraq, Lebanon, and the occupied Palestinian territories. The potential of cooperatives for sharing risk, pooling resources, learning together, generating income, and balancing work and family responsibilities, has yet to be actualized. Cooperatives in the...

Women are a major human resource and assure adequate nutrition, health and cognitive development of their households and children in their formative years. However, women are over-represented among the poor, suffer heavy workloads and have little control over resources for family care. Poverty and food insecurity are enhanced by lack...

A mediados de la década de los ochenta, los derechos de las mujeres rurales emergen en la agenda regional. La denuncia de los movimientos sociales y la gradual profundización de la participación de las mujeres en la elaboración de alternativas políticas, sociales y económicas propiciaron transformaciones en las políticas públicas...

Participants in the workshop shared experiences from nine projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. All projects had a common objective: to add value to an agricultural product and link smallholder farmers to profitable markets in a lasting way. The commodities included bulb onions in Kenya and Tanzania; fresh fruits in...

La Política Nacional de Desarrollo Rural Integral que aquí se presenta, es el fruto del trabajo de varios meses de diálogo, así como de formulación y discusión de propuestas entre gobierno y organizaciones sociales, en el marco del proceso establecido el 30 de abril de 2008 con la oficialización e...

This paper uses a rural household survey dataset collected in 2006 and 2008 to investigate the impact of a market-based land resettlement project in southern Malawi. The program provided a conditional cash and land transfer to poor families to relocate to larger plots of farm land. The average treatment effect...

Con este trabajo se da continuidad al trabajo Los pequeños productores en la República Argentina, desarrollado en el marco de un acuerdo entre el Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganadería y Pesca (en aquel momento, Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Pesca y Alimentos) y el IICA. Continuando los lineamientos metodológicos de dicho estudio,...

This paper uses the well-known Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique to understand the determinants of wage-gaps between men and women, between urban and rural workers, and between those employed in the rural agricultural versus the rural non-agricultural sectors, for the 14 developing and transition economies in the RIGA-L dataset. The unexplained male...

Afghanistan is a beautiful country with a rich history. Today it faces enormous challenges. Afghanistan’s terrain is mountainous, dry, and subject to extreme droughts and devastating floods. Decades of conflict coupled with abuse, overexploitation and mismanagement of its natural resources have decimated its forests, degraded its rangelands and wetlands, and...

At the end of 2009, despite the international commitments made to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, over a billion people are going hungry and 70% of those women and men who suffer from hunger live in rural areas. These alarming results inevitably raise questions as to the effectiveness of the...

Welcome to Dimitra Newsletter No. 16! This issue is devoted – as all our newsletters are – to the empowerment of women and men living in rural areas. FAO’s efforts in the Great Lakes Region highlight the fact that Farmer Field Schools can be instrumental in addressing a range of...

On 16 October 2008, FAO celebrated World Food Day with a parallel event entitled “­Women have solutions to the food crisis: towards long-term structural changes”. This issue of the Dimitra newsletter focuses in particular on how – in an international context of rising food prices and raw material shortages –...

Among the experiences shared in this newsletter, we would like to focus on Dimitra and its partners’ work in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the field of rural radio and participatory communication. A rural radio and listeners’ club project, conducted in South Kivu province with SAMWAKI and GTZ-Santé, is...

The contribution of non-timber forest products (NTFP) to rural income is a subject highly debated in the literature. In this study the economic value and contribution to family income of greenery products collected by rural women from four species that grow in secondary forests of the Coastal Range of the...

This paper provides the results of an international survey of practitioners with experience in facilitating the participation of African smallholder farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or differentiated agricultural products. It explores their perceptions about the constraints inhibiting and the impacts associated with this supply chain participation. It also examines...