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The present document reviews and assesses the recent and ongoing initiatives dedicated to monitoring and analysing Public Expenditure in support of Agriculture (PEA) in Africa. This document fills a gap and responds to the need of policy-makers and policy analysts in Africa for a detailed and analytical review of what exists in terms of PEA monitoring and analysis in Africa. The objective of the present review is thus to: (i) shed light on PEA monitoring and analysis initiatives in Africa: not only their method and definition of agriculture, but also their nature, objectives, scope, current status, and most importantly their [...]

L’objectif de cette édition de La situation des marchés des produits agricoles est d’atténuer la polarisation actuelle des points de vue sur les impacts qu’a le commerce des produits agricoles sur la sécurité alimentaire, et sur la manière dont le commerce agricole devrait être régi de sorte qu’une ouverture accrue aux échanges profite à tous les pays. En donnant des éléments concrets et des éclaircissements sur une gamme de sujets, le présent rapport vise à contribuer à un débat plus éclairé sur les choix de politique et à dresser l’inventaire des améliorations qu’il faut apporter dans les processus politiques au [...]

From 2003, the Zero Hunger Program and subsequently, in 2011, the Brazil Without Poverty Plan, marked a deliberate convergence of the purposes and actions focused on farmers and family farmers in Brazil. This allowed simultaneous access to social policies and polices focused on agriculture and livestock activities, through a permanent set of public policies, such as rural credit, climate and income insurance, technical assistance and commercialization. This happened in parallel to affirmative actions related to gender, ethnicity and rural youth. To deal with such complex themes such as eradicating hunger and extreme poverty, the Federal Government began to integrate traditionally [...]

This publication “School feeding and possibilities for direct purchases from family farming in Latin American countries” contributes to the articulation of the sectors involved with school feeding, in the search for alternatives for the institutionalization and strengthening of school feeding policies in the countries; it is also hoped that in the medium and long term SFPs can contribute to the human right to food (HRF) and to sustainable human development.

The “Right to Food Handbook” series is a collection of 10 publications, prepared in collaboration with PROSALUS, based on the different volumes of the Right to Food Methodological Toolbox.  Each publication provides practical information and guidance on how to implement the right to food and apply human rights-based approaches to key areas of work, namely, legislation, monitoring, assessment, budget and education.   

This tool has been designed as a way to provide comprehensive policy support to governments and development partners in the context of FAO’s Integrated Country Approach for promoting Decent Rural Employment (DRE). 

In a high and volatile food price setting, two aspects determine rural women’s  ability to absorb and respond to shocks: the inequalities that create a gender gap in rural development and women’s traditional roles in society and the  household. This discussion paper points to these two aspects that, in general  terms, reduce women’s ability to cope with food price volatility. Rural women,  traditionally responsible for providing food and health in the household, face major  constraints in fulfilling their roles, rendering them more vulnerable to food price spikes. Major recommendations include building on rural women’s resiliency and mitigating negative coping strategies [...]

Attempts have been made to institutionalize government programmes in favour of long-term and comprehensive strategies: notably, the introduction and reinforcement of conditional cash transfer programmes and free food distribution systems. Input distributions continue to be the main policy instrument to support farmers.

Innovative and integrated actions to modernize and facilitate the transformation from subsistence to commercial agriculture are foremost on Ethiopia’s agenda. Initiatives to address soil depletion with the end goal of sustainably increasing productivity, building resilience in efforts to promote food sufficiency of vulnerable households, and tapping livestock sector potential to generate foreign exchange, are just three of the key policy trends that have emerged over the 2007─2013 period in Ethiopia. For more country policy briefs by FAPDA please see here.

Burkina Faso has succeeded in achieving the Maputo Declaration target by allocating at least 10 percent of the national budget to agriculture almost every year since 2003. Most of these expenditures have been allocated to support the production of cotton, one of the country’s main exports, through input subsidies and minimum prices to producers. However, a large portion of the country’s agricultural investments as well as social safety net programmes remain heavily dependent on donor funding. For more country policy briefs by FAPDA please see here.