This very interesting paper, co-authored by FCRN member Ken Giller, pays serious attention to the question of what a family farm actually is and the assumptions that people make about them. Taking as its starting point for exploration the FAO’s assertion that family farms are important as a means of eradicating poverty, providing food and achieving sustainable development, it explores the characteristics and patterns of family farming in countries as diverse as the United States, Netherlands, China, Brazil, Ethiopia and India.

Abstract: In the course of the ongoing discussions and negotiations on the post-2015 development agenda, a consensus emerged that current and future social, environmental and economic challenges are interlinked and must be addressed through an integrated approach. 

FAO has launched a new online platform, which provides access to resources on developing sustainable food value chains (SFVC). The goal is for SFVC development to provide a flexible framework to improve food systems, reducing poverty and hunger in a sustainable manner.  FAO’s platform will include:

Animal products are vital components of the diets and livelihoods of people across sub-Saharan Africa. They are frequently traded in local, unregulated markets and this can pose significant health risks.

This report from Oxfam discusses large-scale partnerships between governments in Africa and donors and multinational companies. “Moral Hazard? ‘Mega’ public–private partnerships in African agriculture” is as the name suggests critical of these partnerships (PPP) and questions whether these partnerships lead to poverty eradication and improved rural livelihoods. The report argues that this way of mobilizing funds for the agricultural sector is often unproven and risky.

In this blog post for Global Food Security, former FAO agricultural economist Andrew MacMillan says the doctrine that food prices should be kept as low as possible to end hunger is wrong.

This paper critiques the concept of sustainable intensification as follows: “Though often lauded by scientists and policy makers alike as a panacea to the mass environmental degradation that accompanies typical food production processes, the authors find that ‘sustainable intensification’ is actually highly unsustainable as it fails to consider the long run social, economic and ecological consequences of intensified production. Thus the authors aim to redefine the scope of the discourse, moving beyond simple calls for increased production capacities to instead enmesh food security within a more holistic approach to development which requires better governance, more empowerment, and greater access and fairer distribution of food within more resilient food systems. Ultimately, sustainable intensification is rendered worthless if those facing dire food insecurity remain unable to access the yields of increasing production.“ 

This study calculates that crops grown on land obtained through large scale acquisitions in developing countries could potentially feed 100 million more people than current practices do today.

This research argues that we need to implement a food waste hierarchy approach to preventing and managing food surplus and waste. It argues that a distinction between food surplus and waste is crucial as is the distinction between avoidable and unavoidable waste. Its main message is that food waste can be prevented by adopting a sustainable production and consumption approach and by tackling food surplus and waste throughout the global food supply chain.