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Report on how the first wave of COVID-19 impacted on smallholder farmers in northern Shan State in Myanmar. The study examines the interactions of reduced border trade, remittances and contracted labour markets on household food security, nutrition and land tenure. In turn, tenure insecurity in rural areas may deepen the effects of COVID-19, as most rural people struggle to sustain their livelihoods through access to land and other natural resources. This is relevant as many ethnic groups in northern Shan State continue to manage their land through customary tenure systems that are not fully recognized by state authorities.See the full [...]

Bees provide a critical link in the maintenance of ecosystems, pollination. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, enhancing forest regeneration, providing sustainability and adaptation to climate change and improving the quality and quantity of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops that produce fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality. Beekeeping, also called apiculture, refers to all activities concerned with the practical management of social bee species.These guidelines aim to provide useful information and [...]

The Progress towards Sustainable Agriculture initiative (PROSA) is a framework that seeks to complement ongoing efforts on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and particularly indicator 2.4.1, to support country-level assessments using data already available at the national level. Making agriculture more sustainable – productive, environmentally friendly, resilient and profitable is fundamental, as agriculture remains the main source of livelihood for the majority of the world’s poor and hungry. The pathway towards sustainable agriculture must ensure increasing output, but also make more efficient use of increasingly scarce global resources, be resilient to and help mitigate climate change, and improve human well-being.This [...]

Growing international and domestic demand for tropical timber has resulted in critical wood supply gaps for many tropical timber-producing countries, in some instances linked to a surge in illegal logging. Growing shortages of legal timber supply have necessitated the exploration of alternative sources of legally produced timber. Community forestry has been recognized as a potential source that could boost legal timber supply on the domestic market of tropical timber-producing countries. This brief seeks to share the experience accrued across Asia, Africa and Latin America in addressing and overcoming challenges faced in legal frameworks, market access, and capacity building.

Informal forest sector micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are often equated with being “illegal” when their mode of production, source of raw materials, or even their legal existence does not conform with their country’s regulatory requirements. This characterization fails to recognize the complex circumstances many MSMEs faces, especially in countries where the requirements for legality compliance and achieving formal status are not clear. This situation raises a question frequently faced by practitioners who work with forest sector MSMEs – should MSMEs be encouraged to formalize to avoid being labeled as ‘illegal’? Acknowledging that MSMEs have valid reasons to either pursue [...]

To support the implementation of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and help achieve its goals, there is a need for a shared vision of ecosystem restoration. A key step in creating a shared vision of ecosystem restoration is to adopt principles that underpin the full set of ecosystem restoration activities. To this end, this brochure presents ten principles for ecosystem restoration including a first principle that orients restoration in the context of the UN Decade, followed by nine best-practice principles. These best-practice principles detail the essential tenets of ecosystem restoration that should be followed to maximize net gain for [...]

To facilitate sustainable management of logged forests in the Caribbean, forest authorities of Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the University of Hamburg as a scientific partner, implemented the regional project “Ensuring Long-Term Productivity of Lowland Tropical Forests in the Caribbean” financed by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The main objective of the project was to support the sustainable management of logged forests to maintain productivity and prevent further degradation. For this purpose, extensive field studies were conducted in the project countries, which resulted [...]

Natural hazard‑induced disasters (NHID), such as floods, droughts, severe storms, and animal pests and diseases have significant, widespread and long‑lasting impacts on agricultural sectors around the world. With climate change set to amplify many of these impacts, a “business‑as‑usual” approach to disaster risk management in agriculture cannot continue if we are to meet the challenges of agricultural productivity and sustainability growth, and sustainable development. Drawing from seven case studies – Chile, Italy, Japan, Namibia, New Zealand, Turkey and the United States – this joint OECD‑FAO report argues for a new approach to building resilience to NHID in agriculture. It explores the [...]

Mexico's gross domestic product (GDP) contracted unprecedentedly as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. While the primary sector has relatively been the most resilient, the agriculture sector lacks sufficiently strong productive dynamism and has high rates of informal work and low wages. Investing more in the sector's productive infrastructure would help accelerate economic recovery while improving people’s well-being. A public investment policy should be developed on the basis of evidence, such as that provided in this study. In 21 prospective scenarios that simulate the allocation of additional public investment in productive infrastructure across subsectors of agriculture, equivalent to 0.25 percent of [...]

The paper investigates the basics of public stockholding, exploring the objectives of such programmes, the policy instruments used to achieve them, and their possible market impacts. It also synthesizes country experiences in implementing public stockholding programmes in different regions and presents the evolution of administered and international prices over the last decade. Finally, the paper highlights the main elements of the WTO negotiations on public stockholding for food security, and some of the issues that need to be resolved to help achieve consensus in this area.