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Agriculture is feeding the world’s 7.3 billion people but at an unbearable social and environmental cost. Clayton Campanhola, Director of the FAO Plant Production and Protection Division, explains the need for sustainable food and agriculture on a global scale. He describes the FAO policy work, including key policy messages, to achieve this goal. See all videos in the Policy and Governance series :  AR  CH  EN   FR  RU  SP

If global population and food consumption trends continue, by 2050 the world will need 60 percent more food than is available today. Matthias Halwart, Senior Strategic Programmer Officer of the FAO Sustainable Agriculture Programme, explains the importance of sustainable agricultural intensification and its contribution to meeting this demand. He describes the FAO policy work, including key policy messages, to achieve food security.  See all videos in the Policy and Governance series:  AR  CH  EN   FR  RU  SP

End hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition are at the heart of the sustainable development goals. The World has committed to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. But climate change is undermining the livelihoods and food security of the rural poor, who constitute almost 80% of the world’s poor. The effects of climate change on our ecosystems are already severe and widespread. Climate change brings a cascade of impacts from agroecosystems to livelihoods. Climate change impacts directly agroecosystems, which in turn has a potential impact on agricultural production, which drives economic and social impacts, which impact livelihoods. In other [...]

Women and men play specific and complementary roles in agriculture and food and nutrition security, and building the resilience of their livelihoods in different ways. In most countries, women have less access to productive resources, services and employment opportunities than men. The gender gap is found for many assets, inputs and services such as land, livestock, labor, education, information services, and technology, all affecting the capacity to protect their communities from crises. While men account for the majority of direct casualties during wartime, women and children suffer more from displacement, reduced access to services and assistance, and loss of livelihoods. [...]

Agriculture and social protection are fundamentally linked in the context of rural livelihoods in Africa. Poor and food-insecure families depend primarily on agriculture and partly on non-farm income and private transfers for their livelihoods, and are the main target of social protection interventions (FAO, 2015). When embedded within a broader rural development framework, stronger coherence between agriculture and social protection interventions can assist in improving the welfare of poor small family farms by facilitating productive inclusion, improving risk-management capacities, and increasing agricultural productivity – all of which enable rural-based families to gradually move out of poverty and hunger (Tirivayi et [...]

Four years since the Voluntary Guidelines were endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security as the global consensus on improving tenure, their principles and processes are inspiring people around the world to take action. With wide ownership by governments, civil society and the private sector, they represent an unbiased framework in which new conversations on tenure are taking place, new skills are being developed, and new policies are being influenced in participatory ways. This brief shares some stories on improving tenure from Africa, Asia, Europe and Central Asia and Latin America. These cases have been supported by FAO, working [...]

In Senegal, the government has given great importance and priority to the development and promotion of national rice production to achieve self-sufficiency by 2017. Besides, emphasis has been placed on risk management with the creation of the National Agricultural Insurance Company (CNAAS) and several plans dedicated to flood and water management.

Consistent with its mandate to pursue a world free from hunger and malnutrition, the following “FAO Policy on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples” has been formulated so as to ensure that FAO will make all due efforts to respect, include and promote indigenous issues in relevant work. In so doing, it joins the international community’s increasing mobilization in favour of the rights and concerns of indigenous peoples, most of whom suffer disproportionately from multiple adversities such as discrimination, poverty, ill health, political under-representation, and environmental and cultural degradation. Although much attention is focused on the challenges that indigenous peoples face, it [...]

Drylands cover nearly half of the earth’s land surface and are home to one-third of the global population. They face extraordinary challenges, including those posed by desertification, biodiversity loss, poverty, food insecurity and climate change. Up to 20 percent of the world’s drylands are degraded, and people living there are often locked into a vicious circle of poverty, unsustainable practices and environmental degradation. It is clear that serious efforts are needed to arrest dryland degradation and restore degraded lands, and the simple but urgent aim of these guidelines is to support such efforts. It is the first time that global guidelines on [...]

This 35-minute module addresses the basic terms and concepts relating to food and nutrition, malnutrition, food security and livelihoods. By the end of this module, you will be able to define and differentiate these key concepts and understand the different situations that they encompass. Understanding these concepts is indeed very important in order to be able to assess the nutrition situation, to design and implement programmes, investments and policies that address nutrition problems (also called "nutrition-sensitive"), and to evaluate the nutritional outcomes of programmes, investments and policies.