The Arab countries account for more than 5 per cent of the world’s population, but less than 1 per cent of global water resources. And as a consequence of the phenomena associated with climate change, the region is facing an even greater water shortage. For 30 years now, IFAD and...

Estonia falls into the Nemoral and Boreal biogeographical zones – regions naturally dominated by coniferous forests, with extensive mires. Farmers in at least certain parts in Estonia, as in other countries in these zones, traditionally made use of all the possible forage resources available to them to tide their animals...

Proposing a coherent and unified definition of permanent pastures in France is not easy in the detail neither from technical nor from administrative point of view. Starting from usual and specialised dictionaries, the definition of a “pasture” shows a certain blur between a general definition in which a pasture is...

The cross-compliance booklet for Northern Ireland states “Permanent pasture is defined as permanent grassland which is over five years old which has been declared on the Area Aid application in 2003. Land which has been ploughed and reseeded within the same year may be defined as permanent pasture”.

Permanent pastures (PP) of various types dominate the Scottish agricultural landscape. Recent census-based statistics show that permanent pastures in the widest sense account for 82% of Scotland’s farmland, making up an estimated 75% of all land claimed in IACS.

Sweden has a tradition of managing semi-natural pastures with a relatively high amount of trees and bushes. Some of the typical habitats also have low fodder value, but it is often not correlated with tree density. These pastures are mainly alvar grazing (habitat type 6280, Nordic alvar and Pre-Cambrian calcareous...

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...

This is a story about how FAO assisted groups of farmers in five farming communities in the moist savannah zone of South Western Burkina Faso to enhance their crop-livestock systems through Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices, including crop diversification, using an innovative farmer discovery process, to bring about agricultural intensification and...

The present study was carried out in North Sinai region. Data were collected as part of the project "Multinational approaches to enhance goat production in the Middle East" sponsored by MERC, USAID. Three goat production systems were identified according to water source and type of feeding or grazing: (i) the...

Este material recoge la riqueza tecnológica, agropecuaria y cultural de la provincia de Canchis; mitos e historias son utilizados conjuntamente como herramientas pedagógicas para lograr un aprendizaje que fomente el desarrollo y la modernización de técnicas de crianza, pero que a la vez revalore las prácticas tradicionales de las comunidades altoandinas. 

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...

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,...

Livelihoods in Darfur are intimately linked to the conflict, none more so than the livelihoods of the Northern Rizaygat—a group of Arabicspeaking, camel-herding nomads living in the Sudanese states of North, South, and West Darfur. They have achieved notoriety for their role in the Janjaweed—the pejorative name given to the...

Is low greenhouse gas emission (GHG) agriculture possible? Is it, in fact, desirable? In seeking answers to these two basic but extremely relevant questions, this study examines current farming practices, and incorporates scientific databases from longterm field experiments as case studies for low GHG agriculture. Further, the study examines the...

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 –...

La bioseguridad, en producción animal, corresponde a aquellas acciones enfocadas a prevenir el ingreso y diseminación de las enfermedades en un plantel. Este estudio tiene por objetivo medir el actual nivel de bioseguridad, de los pequeños productores ovinos de las Regiones VI, VII y VIII. Se definieron 105 Especificaciones Técnicas...

Wolves have been coming back for several years in the southern French Alps. In two valleys of the Mercantour national park, they have been present for 15 years. Sheep farmers have to adapt their farming systems to this presence. We carried out surveys among the sheep farmers i) to describe...

The first International Workshop “Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Land Management to Improve the Livelihood of People in Dry Areas” has been held at The Arab Centre for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD) with support of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) from 7th - 9th...

This study showed that indigenous and local community strategies of drought management are no longer effective in coping with drought and the action plans that have been launched by the governments to manage this climatic hazard are mostly crisis based programs that encourage the dependency of the producers on the...

Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, which is dominated by smallscale, mixed crop, and livestock farming, is the mainstay of the country’s economy. It constitutes more than half the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), generates more than 85 percent of the foreign exchange earnings, and employs about 80 percent of the population. Ethiopia’s...