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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 FAO Investment Centre provides a wide range of support services to help countries make more and better investments in food and agriculture. This review looks back at the work the Centre carried out with its partners in 2020. Despite a challenging year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre’s global team supported investment-related policy and sector studies to increase policy dialogue and contributed to the design, technical assistance, supervision or evaluation of investment projects in 120 countries. The Centre increasingly linked both its policy work with investment support to scale up impact. And it promoted greater knowledge sharing and innovation, while [...]

Climate change is a major challenge for agriculture, a vital source of food, income and employment for most of the world’s poor. Agricultural investments, as a result, need to become more climate sensitive. This is as true for general agricultural investments focused on development outcomes as for projects specifically addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation. This comprehensive knowledge product provides investment practitioners with practical reference material on integrating climate risk considerations at all stages of the investment project cycle, from design to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Produced by multidisciplinary teams across FAO, the knowledge product is organized as a compendium of [...]

There has been a surge in the attention to sustainable agricultural mechanization for Africa. The need to support agricultural mechanization in the value chain in order to achieve agricultural and rural development is well recognized. Therefore, it is vital to address the major challenge of ensuring that business models for mechanization hire services driven by the private sector (including farmers, cooperatives, and small and medium enterprises) are not only profitable, sustainable and inclusive for smallholder farmers and vulnerable community members including women and youth, but also resilient to the effects of climate change. For a better understanding of how agricultural [...]

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 addresses the subject of decent rural employment for youth in the forestry sector. It is based on case studies carried out across different processes in the value chain within the sector in Uganda, ranging from seedbed development through to plantation management, saw logging and trading.Findings indicate that a considerable number of Uganda’s legal and policy frameworks emphasize the participation of youth in the labour market, especially given that young people constitute a large majority of the country’s population. However, only a few of these frameworks focus on decent work, whether for young people or the country’s workers more [...]

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.

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.

Public support mechanisms for agriculture in many cases hinder the transformation towards healthier, more sustainable, equitable, and efficient food systems, thus actively steering us away from meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and targets of the Paris Agreement.This report sets out the compelling case for repurposing harmful agricultural producer support to reverse this situation, by optimizing the use of scarce public resources, strengthening economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and ultimately driving a food systems transformation that can support global sustainable development commitments.The report provides policymakers with an updated estimate of past and current agricultural producer support for 88 countries, projected [...]

L'objectif de ce guide est de fournir un document de travail aux autorités de l'État du port à utiliser dans la mise en œuvre de la Résolution de la CTOI sur les mesures de l'État du port qui est entrée en vigueur le 1er mars 2011 et a été modifiée en 2016 pour inclure une disposition sur les mesures électroniques de l'État du port. Ce guide doit être considéré comme un document évolutif qui peut être révisé et amélioré par toutes les parties au fur et à mesure que l’expérience s’élargit dans la mise en œuvre de la Résolution sur les [...]