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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.

This White/Wiphala paper on Indigenous Peoples’ food systems is the result of collective work by Indigenous Peoples’ representatives and experts, scientists, researchers, and UN staff. Over 47 different units, organizations, and institutions have contributed to the Paper from the seven socio-cultural regions. This final version of the White/Wiphala paper has been coordinated by the Global-Hub on Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems and edited by a Technical Editorial Committee, and summarises the main points received.This Paper advocates that lessons can be learnt from Indigenous Peoples’ approach to food, which will contribute to the resilience and sustainability of food systems worldwide, as well [...]

Land and labour rights can intersect in multiple ways. Investments in large-scale plantations often entail trade-offs between job creation and compressions of land rights. Also, labour relations can involve tenure dimensions, for example where estate managers sublet plots for workers to complement wages with food production for their family or local markets. Casual or seasonal employment and limited application of labour legislation can create precarity not only in workers’ employment but also in their tenure rights, with entire families dependent upon the employment status of one individual – thus perpetuating generational labour obligations, affecting relations within the family and the [...]

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.

The Agricultural Outlook 2021-2030 is a collaborative effort of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations as well as input from collaborating member countries to provide an annual assessment of the prospects for the coming decade of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets. The publication consists of 11 Chapters; Chapter 1 covers agricultural and food markets; Chapter 2 provides regional outlooks and the remaining chapters are dedicated to individual commodities.Projections by commodity     Cereals     Oilseeds and [...]

The Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, at its Seventeenth Regular Session, requested its Secretary to prepare for review by the intergovernmental technical working groups on animal, aquatic, forest and plant genetic resources to produce an up-to-date survey of existing legislative, administrative and policy approaches, including best practices, for ABS for the different subsectors of GRFA and traditional knowledge associated with GRFA held by indigenous peoples and local communities, with the aim of identifying typical approaches and lessons learned from their implementation, as well as challenges and possible solutions.The current survey comprises a baseline desktop review of legislation, [...]

The overarching objective of this report was to determine, from current evidence and experiences from the region, a view of co-management application and performance. Among the findings of the review are: (1) Co-management is associated with positive trends across a range of social, ecological and governance indicators; (2) While overall trends in co-management performance are positive, between years the outcomes experienced by fishers and community members vary substantially between positive experiences and improvements and negative experiences and declines; (3) There is substantial variation in the systems to which co-management is applied and the degrees of inclusion, agency, influence and authority of [...]

The adoption of Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security (Right to Food Guidelines) by in 2004 and the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) in 2014 were two major achievements in the effort to ensure food security and nutrition.This handbook has been developed to support the joint implementation of the SSF Guidelines and the Right to Food Guidelines through an integrated approach and to increase policy coherence and uptake. The document provides an overview [...]

INFOODS is the International Network of Food Data Systems. It was established in 1984. It is a worldwide network of food composition experts aiming to improve the quality, availability, reliability and use of food composition data. INFOODS also stands as a forum through which international harmonization and support for food composition activities can be achieved and advocated. INFOODS is organized into several regional data centers with a global coordinator. In this context, INFOODS and FAO provide guidelines, standards, compilation tools, databases, capacity development tools, policy advice, advocacy tools, technical assistance at country level; and they represent a fora to link [...]

Achieving Food Security in the future while using water resources in a sustainable manner is a major challenge for us and the next generations. Agriculture is a key water user. A careful monitoring of water productivity in agriculture and exploring opportunities to increase it are required. But how can we monitor the performance of water use in agriculture? FAO has developed a publicly accessible near real time database using satellite data that allows monitoring of agricultural water productivity.