In a recent blog-post on the UN’s Academic Impact website, Sonja Vermeulen and Andy Challinor write the third piece in a series on Food security and climate change entitled “Global Models Must Meet Grassroots Action to Deliver Climate Solutions for Farmers”. 

Through the integration of gender analysis into resilience thinking, this book shares field-based research insights from a collaborative, integrated project aimed at improving food security in subsistence and smallholder agricultural systems.

In this publication FAO highlights the latest statistics on global food insecurity. The latest available estimates indicate that about 795 million people in the world – just over one in nine – were undernourished in 2014–16. In relative terms, the share of undernourished people in the population, or the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU), has decreased from 18.6 percent in 1990–92 to 10.9 percent in 2014–16, reflecting fewer undernourished people in a growing global population.

This report was produced by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, IPES-Food -a new transdisciplinary initiative to support, inform and advise the policy debate on how to reform food systems across the world.

Better links between urban and rural areas will ensure that farmers in China are seen as equal to city workers and that they can take a greater part in the country’s development than before, Xi said when addressing the communist party’s policy chiefs at a session of the Central Committee’s Political Bureau.

Coffee is the most widely traded agricultural commodity of the tropics, and studies have shown that as a crop it is very sensitive to rising temperatures arising from, climate change. Two new studies now look at the implications of warmer temperatures on Arabica coffee production.

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.

As much as 75 percent of global seed diversity in staple food crops is held and actively used by a wide range of small farmholders - workers of less than three to seven acres - with the rest in gene banks.

The CCAFS (CGIAR research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security) newsletter Agriculture-Climate Letters - A Science-Policy Bulletin, is a valuable resource for those interested in receiving further updates on the links between food and climate –with a particular focus on developing countries. In their latest issue Sonja Vermeulen, CCAFS head of research, highlights the special issue of Environmental Research Letters on mitigation in the agriculture and land use sectors in developing countries.  See more information about the CCAFS newsletter and how to sign up here and read the full Environmental Letter series here.