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This series of technical briefs aims to provide a solid knowledge base for building or strengthening stakeholder capacities on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and applying CSA practices to five crops that are critical to the global agri-food sector: coffee, cowpea, maize, rice and wheat. These briefing notes reflect the growing recognition of the need to share knowledge, best practices, lessons learned and experiences on CSA. They are intended to support stakeholders to make the transition to more sustainable and resilient crop production systems and, thereby reach targets laid out in the Sustainable Development Goals. It is our intent to reach a [...]

The 2022 edition of the flagship publication of the GFCM, The State of Mediterranean and Black Sea Fisheries, provides an up-to-date overview of fisheries status, trends and governance in the region. Now in its fourth instalment, the publication updates the findings from previous editions while analysing emerging issues in the fisheries sector, including the effects of management plans. For the first time, thanks to the recent consolidation of data quality indicators, trends in the fisheries sector are also analysed at the regional level. Based on data and information from GFCM contracting parties and cooperating non-contracting parties, The State of Mediterranean [...]

Evidence shows that the improvement in food and nutrition security is mostly due to policies, programs and frameworks that are anchored in legislation. Parliamentarians play a key role in promoting and approving laws and policies to eradicate hunger and malnutrition. Despite the various challenges to be faced, as those posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, parliamentarians reiterated their commitment to learning from each other’s, sharing their experiences, strengthening collaboration between countries and regions, thus stimulating the adoption of laws, policies and programs, but also, the allocation and supervision of public budgets. In addition, the parliamentary sector plays a fundamental role in [...]

Countries’ varying natural resource endowments are vital in explaining international trade. Traditional trade theory suggests that differences in technology and factor endowments lead countries to specialize and export certain goods or services in which they have a comparative advantage.The computable general equilibrium (CGE) model simulations used in this paper aim to explain agricultural trade patterns and show how agricultural trade would change in response to productivity, infrastructure and institutions improvements and trade cost changes from regional and global trade liberalization. A set of nine scenarios is used to explore the effects of productivity, transport costs, non-tariff barriers (NTB), and border [...]

This paper examines the distributional impacts of agricultural policies versus those of cash transfers using a tax–benefit microsimulation model for Zambia for the policy year 2020. The analysis also considers the behavioural impacts of input subsidies and social cash transfers. The results indicate that Zambian agricultural policies reduce headcount poverty by 3–5 percentage points, depending on whether only their direct impacts or also behavioural impacts that lead to changes in agricultural production are taken into account. The paper also considers policy reforms where the goal is to achieve similar, or even greater, poverty reduction with smaller government net expenditure. The results [...]

The December issue of the publication summarizes the salient trends and market outlook in 2022. International dairy prices eased in recent months due to subdued import demand. Moreover, global milk production is forecast to expand slightly, sustained by growth in Asia. Meanwhile, world dairy trade may contract for the first time in two decades.

This paper assesses the food security impacts of widespread agricultural interventions, aiming at increasing agricultural yields, and explores the role played by adjustments in rural households’ livelihood strategies in mediating those impacts. Our empirical strategy combines project and remote-sensing data with a household panel survey and exploits the timing and geographic variation in the roll-out of interventions implemented from 2011 to 2016 by the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), recently renamed as Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI).Results show that agricultural interventions are effectively associated with higher agricultural yields, better food security outcomes and adjustments in livelihood strategies. However, when exploring the [...]

This publication offers a synthesis of the major factors at play in the global food and agricultural landscape. Statistics are presented in four thematic chapters, covering the economic importance of agricultural activities, inputs, outputs and factors of production, their implications for food security and nutrition and their impacts on the environment. The Yearbook is meant to constitute a primary tool for policymakers, researchers and analysts, as well as the general public interested in the past, present and future path of food and agriculture. Read online the digital report See also the World Food and Agriculture - Statistical Pocketbook 2022

This report aims at inspiring strategic thinking and actions to transform agrifood systems towards a sustainable, resilient and inclusive future, by building on both previous reports in the same series as well as on a comprehensive corporate strategic foresight exercise that also nurtured FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31. It analyses major drivers of agrifood systems and explores how their trends could determine alternative futures of agrifood, socioeconomic and environmental systems. The fundamental message of this report is that it is still possible to push agrifood systems along a pattern of sustainability and resilience, if key “triggers” of transformation are properly activated. [...]

Automation has been shaping world agriculture since the early twentieth century. Motorized mechanization has brought significant benefits in terms of improved productivity, reduced drudgery and more efficient allocation of labour, but also some negative environmental impacts. More recently, a new generation of digital agricultural automation technologies has appeared, with the potential to further enhance productivity, as well as resilience, while also addressing the environmental sustainability challenges driven by past mechanization.The State of Food and Agriculture 2022 looks into the drivers of agricultural automation, including the more recent digital technologies. Based on 27 case studies, the report analyses the business case [...]