Over the last 70 years, the use of plastics in agrifood systems and food value chains has become increasingly widespread. From fishing gear and tree guards to greenhouses, plastics can increase productivity and efficiency in agriculture and help curb food loss and waste, and yet are a major source of contamination.   As “Planet vs. Plastics” is the theme chosen to mark this year’s Earth Day and raise awareness on the health risks connected to plastics, we invite you to have a look at this selection of FAO reports shedding light on the many implications of their use.  

Social protection as a pathway to sustaining peace Global crises are becoming the new normal. From climate change to the contemporary food price crisis, vulnerable populations – and especially rural people – are facing increasingly difficult odds of flourishing. Such challenges are even more pronounced where there is conflict, whose multidimensional nature demands to direct more attention to its drivers and impacts. this paper discusses how social protection can sustain peace efforts by understanding peace not as an outcome but, rather, as an ongoing process.

FAO’s corporate brochures not only answer such questions but correlate them with broader subjects – the bioeconomy, say, or global trade – and tell you what the Organization is doing about them in policy and practical terms. Tone-wise, the brochures stand where the lighter side of academic literature meets the weightier side of ground reportage. Each one is themed around one of FAO’s priority areas of work, such as climate action or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of climate change on rural women, youths and people living in poverty. It analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households (representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries. These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labour allocations and adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age characteristics.

In December 2023, FAO published six “Trade Policy Briefs: FAO Support to the WTO Negotiations at the 13th Ministerial Conference”: (1) Developments and prospects in the international cotton market; (2) Improving food safety to foster trade; (3) The importance of international trade for fisheries and aquaculture products; (4) The WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies and the role of FAO; (5) Trends in inclusion of environmental related provisions linked to the agriculture, fisheries, and forestry sectors in regional trade agreements; and (6) Price transmission in food markets. Check out the Trade Policy Briefs here.