La Via Campesina (LVC) is a transnational social movement, made up of 200 million people across 81 nations. It was formed in 1993 by peasants and smallholder farmers from around the world in response to the negative impacts of trade liberalisation and diminishing state support for small-scale agriculture. It has since grown to include landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers. LVC has played a key role in the food sovereignty movement, leading protests against global free trade agreements and promoting agroecology and smallholder farming. LVC has a decentralised structure, made up of multiple autonomous organisations, and prioritises inclusivity and democratic decision making.

Land sharing is the principle of integrating nature conservation approaches into agricultural production across a region. Its characteristics are that of low-yielding farmland with higher biodiversity, but with less land available for the sole purpose of nature conservation. Land sharing sits at one end of the two extremes of the land sparing-sharing continuum. It has in particular been criticised for leading to lower levels of biodiversity on a regional scale and for a tendency for generalist species to thrive at the expense of specialist or endemic species.

Land sparing is the principle of segregating land for nature conservation from land for food (or agricultural) production within a region. It consists of high-yielding farmland with relatively lower biodiversity, with the remaining land being spared for nature conservation. Land sparing sits at one end of the two extremes of the land sparing-sharing continuum. It has in particular been criticised for its (supposed) connection to environmentally unsustainable intensive agriculture and for undermining the food security of smallholder farmers and rural economies.

Land use is the purpose for which an area of land is used by humans: e.g. cropland, urban settlements, managed forests. Wild land, by contrast, is that not used by humans.

Any plant belonging to the family Fabaceae (commonly known as the pea or bean family), or the fruit or seed of such a plant. Many edible crops are legumes including peas, beans, soybeans, chickpeas, peanuts, and lentils. Edible legumes harvested for their dried seeds are also known as pulses. Some forage crops like clovers and alfalfa are also legumes.

Legumes are of further agricultural importance as the majority form root nodules containing symbiotic (mutualistic) nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Thus, they naturally add nitrogen to the soil and so play a key role in crop rotation and are often used as green manure (particularly clover). Other plants do form such mutualistic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but on far smaller scale. Thus, in agricultural contexts, including legumes in rotations often replaces the role of mineral nitrogen fertiliser.

Life cycle, in the context of life-cycle assessment and carbon footprint analysis, refers to the entirety of phases a product or system passes through from its development, through to its use and, eventually, how it is managed as waste. A life cycle is generally understood to start at the growing and harvesting or mining of raw materials and to end when a product is disposed of as waste. While waste management is thought to be a part of a product’s life cycle, potential recycling is generally considered to be part of the life cycles of other, new products. For example, the life cycle of a loaf of bread may be thought to consist of the following phases: the growing and harvesting of corn and other ingredients (including pre-production of inputs such as fertilisers), their transport to a bakery, bread production, transport and retail, consumption and waste.

A livelihood is a person’s, household’s, or group of people’s means of making a living. It encompasses people’s capabilities, assets, income, and activities that are required for securing the necessities of life, such as food, water, medicine, shelter and clothing.

Livestock on leftovers is the term given to a theoretical model of a food system with a specific, limited role for livestock agriculture inspired by traditional uses of livestock as recyclers of food waste. Using this system, livestock animals would eat only human-inedible feedstuffs such as grass, food waste, waste biomass from biofuel production and other industrial by-products – thus recycling otherwise inedible biomass streams into the food system. This concept has been proposed as a way of minimising feed-food competition without eliminating animal agriculture altogether.