Results
Report
2014
State of the World’s Forests 2014. Enhancing the Socioeconomic Benefits from Forests
The 2014 edition of the State of the World’s Forests report (also known as SOFO) has been released by FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. This coincides with the opening of the 22nd Session of the FAO Committee on Forestry (COFO) and the World Forest Week.
SOFO 2014 deals with the existing knowledge gaps on the socioeconomic benefits provided by forests. It gathers and analyses data already available on the topic. It also makes recommendations to improve this information.
The lack of information about the socioeconomic dimension of forests and the need to fill this gap was also one of [...]
Issue paper
2014
Promoting Economic Diversification and Decent Rural Employment Towards Greater Resilience to Food Price Volatility
The poor are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of high and volatile food prices. Available evidence, while not conclusive, indicates that both urban and rural poor, including poor farmers, are particularly exposed because they are typically net buyers of food (Ivanic and Martin, 2008). Food accounts for as much as three-quarters of the expenditures of poor households in some countries.
Case study
2014
Policy Responses to High Food Prices in Latin America and the Caribbean: Country Case Studies
This publication presents evidence with regard to the effectiveness of policies and programmes introduced in response to rising food prices in eight selected Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru. The case studies provide insights into the economic and policy environment at the time of the first price spike of 2007–08, analyse the measures that were introduced in response and discuss the evidence on the effects on the food security situation.
As such they provide lessons learned in terms of the effectiveness of the different measures in achieving the intended food security goals, including [...]
Briefs
2014
Rewarding the Service Providers. A Policy Brief
The aim of this policy brief is to increase awareness among policy makers and the general public about the vital role of tropical forests in providing environmental services and the increasing need for beneficiaries to compensate forest owners or managers for those services. The brief builds on the insights gained at the International Forum on Payments for Environmental Services of Tropical Forests, which was held in San José, Costa Rica, in April 2014. It sets out the rationale for, and the constraints faced by, PES schemes, and key recommendations for scaling them up.
Report
2013
Good practice policies to eliminate gender inequalities in fish value chains
Policy-makers worldwide have traditionally assumed that fisheries are a male domain. The policy agenda has for decades given priority to the production sphere, where men generally predominate, and has largely neglected processing and marketing activities, where women often play a key role. Recent sex-disaggregated data (from the World Bank, FAO and WorldFish Center) represent an initial, positive step in providing the quantitative evidence needed to convince policy-makers of the impo rtance of women in the sector. The data indicate that women represent 47 percent of the 120 million people engaged in capture fisheries. Worldwide, they are even more important in [...]
Case study
2013
Pakistan. Review of the Wheat Sector and Grain Storage Issues. FAO Investment Centre. Country Highlights
Wheat is of paramount importance in Pakistan, with 80 percent of farmers growing it on a total of about 9 million hectares (ha) - close to 40 percent of the country’s total cultivated land. The crop is grown by predominantly small (0.5 to 5.0 ha) and medium-sized (5 to 10 ha) farmers, whose livelihoods depend on it. Wheat yields in Pakistan remain low, lagging behind those in other countries with comparable agroclimatic conditions. The agro-ecological potential for irrigated wheat in Punjab, Pakistan’s primary production area, suggests that yields of about 6 tonnes/ha could be attained, compared with current yields of 2.5 to 3 tonnes/ha.
Assuming that this potential [...]
Case study
2013
Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems and Well-Being Interventions and policies for healthy communities
This book is about Indigenous Peoples’ food systems and how important local knowledge about foods and the ecosystems that provide them can be used to improve health and well-being. The authors describe processes and activities in nine cultures of Indigenous Peoples, where interventions were developed and implemented with local knowledge, and explain how this information can benefit Indigenous Peoples everywhere, and all of humankind.
Food and nutrition insecurity and the burden of high incidence of non-communicable diseases reach all corners of the globe. This “nutrition transition” is driven by changing lifestyles, loss of livelihoods for all those engaged in food production, increasing poverty and urbanization, and [...]
Issue paper
2013
FAO Trade Policy Technical Notes on Issues Related to the WTO Negotiations on Agriculture. No. 5 Domestic Support: Trade Related Issues and the Empirical Evidence
This Technical Note seeks to address two central questions relating to negotiations towards further disciplines on domestic support measures: (i) what are the characteristics of domestic support measures that cause such measures to have a potentially trade distortionary effect? and (ii) will further WTO disciplines on domestic support measures be effective in reducing levels of trade distorting support?
To provide context, the Note begins by summarizing how domestic support measures are currently disciplined within the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (UR AoA) and discusses the effectiveness of these disciplines. It then highlights the most significant aspects of the August 2004 Framework [...]
Tool
2013
A Tool for Gender-Sensitive Agriculture and Rural Development Policy and Programme Formulation. Guidelines for Ministries of Agriculture and FAO. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)
Agricultural policies should redress gender inequalities to ensure that development interventions in the sector are effective and can achieve enduring positive impacts on the lives and economic potential of rural women, men, girls and boys. One powerful instrument for promoting realization of the rights and potential of rural women and girls is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The purpose of these guidelines is to provide guidance on how FAO and national ministries of agriculture (MoAs) can support and use CEDAW at the country level as a tool for policy development and programming [...]
Tool
2012
Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Analysing Agricultural and Rural Development Policies. Conceptual Aspects and Examples. EASYPol Series 130
This document offers a methodological introduction to Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) for analysing socio-economic impact of agricultural and rural development policies. Firstly, the concept and the structure of an SAM are presented. Next, the concept of policy "instrument" and "objective" variables are introduced and applied for SAM-based policy impact analysis. The module concludes by discussing the multipliers matrix as an instrument for analysing policy impact and presenting some examples.
This paper is part of the FAO Policy series: EASYPol-Resources for policy making (in agriculture, rural development and food security). You can find other EASYPol series' resources in the Resources section of [...]