Agrarian reform is back at the center of the national and rural development debate, a debate of vital importance to the future of the Global South and genuine economic democracy. The World Bank as well as a number of national governments and local land owning elites have weighed in with a series of controversial policy changes. In response, peasants landless, and indigenous peoples’ organizations around the world have intensified their struggle to redistribute land from the underutilized holdings of a wealthy few to the productive hands of the many.

This Backgrounder is the first in a multi-authored series on Cultivating Gender Justice. In this series, we seek to uncover the structural foundations of sexism in the food system and highlight the ways people, communities, organizations, and social movements are dismantling the attitudes, institutions, and structures that hold patriarchy in place. To end hunger and malnutrition, we must end injustices in the food and agriculture system.

Small landholders can implement a range of climatesmart agricultural (CSA) practices and technologies, in order to minimize the adverse effects of climate change and variability, but their adoption largely depends on economic benefits associated with the practices. To demonstrate the potential economic benefits of CSA practices, we conducted a study with smallholder farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) of India.

Seedlings of Artemisia herba-alba grown in glasshouse were watered with differing salinities (0, 150, 250 or 350 mM NaCl) and watering frequencies of 3, 7, 14 or 21 days for a period of 6 weeks. At the end of the study, plant survival, dry matter yield, biomass allocation (shoot and root), leaf area, relative growth rate (RGR), net assimilation rate (NAR), specific leaf area (SLA) and leaf area ratio (LAR) were recorded. When watered with 0 mM NaCl, Artemisia herba-alba plants had similar (P> 0.9) final dry matter weight and 100% survival regardless of watering frequency.

This technical paper details findings and outcomes from the workshop hosted by the Climate Change Unit of Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries of Kenya, along with the FAO, ICRAF and CCAFS. The process engaged stakeholders from research, practice and policy and to interactively share and analyze scientific evidence and field experience from over 40 projects related to climate-smart agriculture (CSA) within integrated farming systems in Kenya.

Agriculture across Africa must undergo a significant transformation to meet the multiple challenges of climate change, food insecurity, malnutrition, poverty and environmental degradation. The case studies described here are just some of the climate-smart agricultural practices that already exist in Africa. This publication aims to inspire farmers, researchers, business leaders, policy makers and

NGOs to take up the mantle of climate-smart agriculture and accelerate the transformation of Africa’s agriculture into a more sustainable and profitable sector.

We examine the geographic dimensions of food consumption in Ecuador, which has one of the highest rates of chronic infant undernutrition in Latin America. We use statistical and spatial analyses to examine the distribution of food consumption and food poverty and to test and generate hypotheses of food poverty estimates at the district level. Results show that the food poor are concentrated in certain locations with a significant cluster identified in the central Andean region.