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Climate change plays an increasingly important role in the international debate on food security. While the key concern is on how climate change can impact world food security: how to meet the food needs of a world population reaching 9.5 billion people under climate uncertainty, the agrifood sector is also increasingly under scrutiny to increase its contribution to climate change mitigation efforts. This is not surprising since worldwide, the agrifood chain (including agriculture as well as food processing, distribution, retail and utilisation) contributes to over 20 percent of total GHG emissions (excluding land use emissions).

A technical guide on safeguarding land tenure rights in line with the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, for government authorities involved in the promotion, approval and monitoring of agricultural investments This technical guide elaborates on specific aspects of the VGGT relating to agricultural investments by providing detailed guidance to government authorities and others on actions they can take to help them to create an enabling environment for responsible and sustainable investments. In following this guidance and applying the principles of the VGGT, governments will be more [...]

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 [...]

La agricultura familiar es un sector clave para lograr la erradicación del hambre y el cambio hacia sistemas agrícolas sostenibles en América Latina y el Caribe y el mundo. Los pequeños agricultores son aliados de la seguridad alimentaria y actores protagónicos en el esfuerzo de los países por lograr un futuro sin hambre. En nuestra región, el 80% de las explotaciones pertenecen a la agricultura familiar, incluyendo a más de 60 millones de personas, convirtiéndose en la principal fuente de empleo agrícola y rural.  No sólo producen la mayor parte de los alimentos para el consumo interno de los países de [...]

In order to acquire an in - depth understanding of potential benefits, constraints and costs of foreign investment in agriculture and of the business models that are more conducive to development, FAO has undertaken research in developing countries.  The research aims to provide better knowledge on the trends and impacts of foreign direct investment on host communities and countries, to gather evidence on inclusive business models, to identify good practices and to develop guidance for host gov ernments.  This publication summarizes the results of this research, in particular through the presentation of the main findings of case studies in nine [...]

Guarantee funds have been used over the years in many countries, forms and contexts as a way to increase the flow of funds into targeted sectors and groups. Various types of guarantee systems and scheme are used to make lending more attractive by sharing or absorbing the risks associated with lending to the targeted sector or type of enterprise. Such systems can also increase the amount of loan funds available to an enterprise beyond its own collateral limits, because the guarantee is a form of loan collateral. The guarantee manager can assume the additional role of loan assessor and monitor, [...]

"Four case studies on credit guarantee funds for agriculture" is an in-depth analysis of different models of guarantee system. An assessment of these cases, together with a review of the global industry of agricultural guarantee systems, was published as "Credit guarantee systems for agriculture and rural enterprise development". The four case studies in this document provide the reader with a more detailed description of how these individual programmes have worked over time. Three of the programmes are among the largest and longest standing agricultural guarantee funds in the world, and have had both successful and difficult experiences as they evolve [...]

This paper reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor of successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow and insure is essential to strengthen women’s role as producers and widen the economic opportunities available to them. For this purpose it is essential to understand how context-specific legal rights, social norms, family responsibilities and women’s access to and control over other resources shape their need for capital and their ability to obtain it. The paper argues that it is important that development strategies that aim to boost rural women’s productive [...]

The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2009 aims to bring to a wider public an accessible discussion of agricultural commodity market issues and related policy matters. Although the findings and conclusions presented rely on recent technical analyses by FAO specialists in commodity and trade issues, this is not an overly technical report. Rather, it seeks to provide an objective and straightforward treatment of what are at times complicated economic issues for policy-makers, commodity market observers and all those interested in agricultural commodity market developments and their impact on developing countries.

Microcredit and micro-insurance, considered within the larger microfinance current, are two risk management tools currently being developed by governments and international development agencies to reduce vulnerability associated with poverty in rural areas. Discussions about credit protection increasingly invoke the need to create linkages with insurance services that are tailored to the risks rural people in developing countries face. Once a country’s financial and banking sectors have been developed, the pairing of these two instruments could do one of two things. It may present a veritable opportunity to emerge from the vicious cycle of poverty, or it may introduce an additional [...]