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This technical guide for addressing gender equality in Sustainable Soil Management (SSM) is designed to provide an easily accessible and understandable reference on how to apply the Voluntary Guidelines on Sustainable Soil Management (VGSSM) for building healthy soils, while ensuring gender equality and women’s empowerment in all aspects of SSM. It is intended for use by a wide audience, including policymakers, public institutions and development partners, as well as by rural communities, farmers’ organizations, women and youth groups, and agricultural advisory services involved in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of soil management policies and programmes. The guide may also be [...]

Young people are key agents of change, with enormous innovation potential. FAO recognizes that youth are already at the frontline to build more sustainable agrifood systems and are best placed to rejuvenate the sector, acquire the knowledge and skills needed to innovate, uptake new technologies, and spearhead the digital transformation. The Organization provides support to countries to develop more youth-inclusive policies, strategies, investments and programmes, in order to enhance the overall well-being of young women and men. This compendium of good practices brings together snapshots of selected FAO’s youth-specific projects, activities and products in support of the Rural Youth Action [...]

The aim of the guidance note on elimination of child labour in agriculture through social protection is to enable practitioners at national, regional and global levels to adapt social protection systems to contribute actively to eliminate child labour in agriculture.Universal social protection can prove an effective means to both address rural poverty and child labour in agriculture, if done right. This requires integrating child labour analysis into social protection policies and programmes, designing social protection programmes that address the underlying drivers of child labour and/or directly target families and communities prone to child labour.This guidance note analyses evidence related to [...]

This review aims to look into the consequences of (1) the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to mitigate the spread of the pandemic and (2) the policies and programmatic responses to mitigate socio-economic consequences of the pandemic and how they have potentially interacted with child labour drivers, especially in agrifood systems. Thus, this review aims to document and spell out how policy and programmatic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular social protection measures, have the potential to prevent or contain an increase of child labour in agriculture at large.

The FAO-IFPRI study, focuses on the use of tractors because they are among the most versatile farm mechanization tools and are universal power sources for all other driven implements and equipment in agriculture, with significant potential to replace animal draught power and human power, including children’s muscle power. Tractor use is typically also the first type of machine-powered equipment in use at lower levels of agricultural development, the context where most child labour is found.Mechanization is mostly assumed to reduce child labour, as it is expected to be labour saving in general. Yet, this is not always the case, as [...]

The FAO-IFPRI study, of which this policy brief is a summary, focuses on the use of tractors because they are among the most versatile farm mechanization tools and are universal power sources for all other driven implements and equipment in agriculture, with significant potential to replace animal draught power and human power, including children’s muscle power. Tractor use is typically also the first type of machine-powered equipment in use at lower levels of agricultural development, the context where most child labour is found.Mechanization is mostly assumed to reduce child labour, as it is expected to be labour saving in general. [...]

Land and labour rights can intersect in multiple ways. Investments in large-scale plantations often entail trade-offs between job creation and compressions of land rights. Also, labour relations can involve tenure dimensions, for example where estate managers sublet plots for workers to complement wages with food production for their family or local markets. Casual or seasonal employment and limited application of labour legislation can create precarity not only in workers’ employment but also in their tenure rights, with entire families dependent upon the employment status of one individual – thus perpetuating generational labour obligations, affecting relations within the family and the [...]

Agricultural production relies heavily on migrant labour across geographies and production systems, from large-scale plantations growing food crops for global supply chains to small-scale pastoralist families following their herds to new pastures depending on seasons. Much of the migration is seasonal, filling peak labour demands, such as during harvest. Hence, stable agri-food systems that can contribute to fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 on zero hunger are intrinsically intertwined with migrant workers’ lives and working conditions.While migration can provide families with new opportunities, it can also pose challenges to children migrating with their parents or left behind. Seasonal agricultural migration [...]

Agricultural production relies heavily on migrant labour across geographies and production systems, from large-scale plantations growing food crops for global supply chains to small-scale pastoralist families following their herds to new pastures depending on seasons. Much of the migration is seasonal, filling peak labour demands, such as during harvest. Hence, stable agri-food systems that can contribute to fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 on zero hunger are intrinsically intertwined with migrant workers’ lives and working conditions.While migration can provide families with new opportunities, it can also pose challenges to children migrating with their parents or left behind. Seasonal agricultural migration [...]

The global aquatic food industry, long under scrutiny over environmental sustainability concerns, has also come under increased scrutiny within the past decade over poor working conditions and severe human rights violations, including widespread use of forced labour and child labour. However, there is limited research and documentation available on child labour in fishing, aquaculture and fish and aquatic food processing globally. Much of the available evidence is centred on labour conditions in global supply chains. However, due to higher levels of informality, limited law enforcement capacity, and so on, it is more likely that children produce fish and aquatic-sourced foods [...]