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Sub-Saharan Africa is uniquely positioned significantly increase its current agricultural productivity to lift the region’s more than 400 million people out of extreme poverty and improve the livelihood of approximately 250 million smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the region. To achieve that, substantive digital transformation of the agriculture sector is required through improved infrastructure and increased access to and use of digital technologies for agriculture. To improve the current understanding of sub-Saharan Africa’s digital agriculture landscape, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) undertook this study in 47 countries. The report is [...]

This policy brief is one in a series led by Chulalongkorn University with support from the Office of the Higher Education Commission, Ministry of Education, Thailand, in partnership with FAO. The series was initiated to support the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Work Plan on Education, 2016–2020 implementation while Thailand was Chair of ASEAN in 2019 under the theme: “Advancing Partnership for Sustainability.” The Briefs offer critical interdisciplinary perspectives on agri-food systems from social and sustainability sciences. They are fully aligned with the regional initiative on Food System Transformation and are meant to support the work engaged with ASEAN.This [...]

This policy brief summarizes the findings of surveys among financial and insurance providers, fishers and fisherfolk organizations in the Philippines in 2021. It explains why financial services are important for small-scale fishers (SSF) and provides recommendations for improving their access to finance and insurance. SSF make an important contribution to food security and the rural economy.The average income of most SSF is below the poverty line of USD 2 500/year. For economic growth and sustainable fishing operations SSF need access to financial and insurance services. Less than 50 percent of the SSF have access to financial services. Only 30 percent [...]

Climate finance is a fundamental element of the global development agenda and has been accelerating in recent years. Yet between 2000 and 2018 the share of global climate finance in the agriculture and land-use sector has decreased, passing from an average of 45 percent of the total flows at the beginning of the millennium, to 24 percent in 2013 where it has since stayed. The total sum of contributions to the agriculture and land-use sector between 2000 and 2018 amounted to USD 122 billion, representing 26 percent of the global climate finance flows to all sectors.This report aims to increase [...]

In this study, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) teamed up to investigate how transformational change (transformational change) is understood in the scientific literature. The study, the first of its kind to review academic studies on transformational change, focuses on two main questions: (i) What does ‘transformational change’ mean? and (ii) What drives it?

The FAO-IFPRI study, of which this policy brief is a summary, focuses on the use of tractors because they are among the most versatile farm mechanization tools and are universal power sources for all other driven implements and equipment in agriculture, with significant potential to replace animal draught power and human power, including children’s muscle power. Tractor use is typically also the first type of machine-powered equipment in use at lower levels of agricultural development, the context where most child labour is found.Mechanization is mostly assumed to reduce child labour, as it is expected to be labour saving in general. [...]

This report presents a structured approach to identify and estimate the market size of specific renewable energy technologies that have the potential to be deployed across specific stages of the agri-food chains. More specifically, the methodology first analyses the countries’ value chains and aggregates them into similar agri-food groups when possible. Once the groupings are defined, the value chains are mapped out and the energy requirements across the different stages of the value chain are defined. Specific renewable energy options are then identified for each value chain based on the energy demand and the process for which energy is required. This [...]

This report provides a comprehensive summary and analysis on how impact tokenization and innovative financial models can promote responsible agri-food supply chains. Recent advances in the development of impact tokenization techniques, distributed ledger technology, and innovative financial models have created new opportunities to improve transparency, verification, and incentive alignment across multiple stakeholders in agri-food supply chains. This report outlines those opportunities and describes how practitioners and policymakers can implement enhanced methods for efficiently defining and verifying impact in agri-food supply chains. The report concludes with an analysis of the most promising financial models for promoting responsible agri-food supply chains.

In response to a growing demand for high-quality and internationally-comparable statistics, FAO develops, implements and promotes methods and standards to guide national data producers in generating and using sound statistics. In particular, the Organization is committed to provide national statistical systems with internationally recognized definitions, concepts and classifications as well as methodological guidance for the production of high quality statistics related to food and agriculture. Find all of FAO's methods and standards - here. Find the most recently published methods and standards under "Download PDF".

When Peruvian fisher, Karin Abensur, caught nearly 800 kilograms of fish early one morning five years ago, she calculated roughly how much she would earn. “I thought, worst case scenario, they would give me 6 soles (USD 1.76) per kilo,” Karin said. But when she returned to the port of Pucusana in central Peru, after four hours on the high seas, she was disappointed to be offered just 1 sol per kilogram – roughly USD 0.30. "They told me to take it, because no one would give me more.”  Read the whole story here.