Early in June 2014, the Micronutrient Forum Global Conference, organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Here, Marie Ruel, Director of the Poverty, Health and Nutrition...[more]

Is there good reason to make family farms a focus of global attention for a year? Or is it not rather reckless to advocate a concept while completely disregarding the fact that the necessary conditions are often not in place? A...[more]

Devastation brought by Typhoon Haiyan on the Philippine island of Leyte in November 2013 need not have assumed such awesome proportions if the island’s original natural environment had not been destroyed by deforestation and...[more]

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.[more]

Despite comprehensive government food subsidies, endemic hunger continues to afflict a large proportion of the Indian population. Amrit Pratel describes what measures have to be taken to raise productivity in agriculture and make...[more]

Many a dogma produced by agricultural policies over the past decades has proved disastrous for African agriculture. Ms Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, Commissioner of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union (AU), looks at...[more]

Initially hailed a huge success, Malawi’s effort to boost agriculture with fertiliser subsidies appears to have met with failure. The author has a look at what went wrong, arguing that developments must be assessed against the...[more]

Why do you care about women’s land rights? Isn’t it enough for the household to have land?“ This question is a common refrain Agnes Quisumbing, researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI, hears from...[more]

“A good incentive for soil conservation”[more]

“Smallholders and the climate could lose out”[more]

The United Nations has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming. Rightly so, says Eve Crowley, Principal Advisor for Gender, Equity and Rural Employment at the FAO, for family farmers play a key role in numerous...[more]

A development policy opting exclusively for value chain development and the integration of producers in modern markets overlooks the reality for the majority of smallholders, our author maintains. Policy should pay greater...[more]

“It’s time for the international community to do more to help large and small farmers manage the many-fold risks they are faced with every day”, writes the CEO of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) Jin-Yong Cai in a...[more]

What role can agricultural research play in poverty reduction? What are the challenges ahead? An interview with Perez del Castillo, Chair of the CGIAR Consortium Board.[more]

At root, hunger is an issue of distributive justice.[more]

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) just held its last major quadrennial Ministerial conference in Doha in April this year. The conference theme was Development-centred globalisation: Towards inclusive...[more]

The debate on sustainability also has to reassess the issue of ethics and the economy: acting in solidarity versus the accumulation of capital in one hand. As a basic principle of acting in solidarity in economics, the notion of...[more]

The United Nations has declared 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives. Charles Gould, Director-General of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), describes the opportunities that this has created.[more]

Every year, all over the world, the International Day of Cooperatives is celebrated on the first Saturday of July. The cooperative movement is extremely powerful. [more]