Increased investment in agriculture and food systems—from both the private and public sectors—is critical to enhance food security and nutrition, reduce poverty, and adapt to climate change. To generate sustainable benefits, this investment must be responsible. What role should investment incentives play in encouraging such investment? This Guide helps to answer that question.

Key Messages and Recommendations

• Combating desertification and land degradation while mitigating the effects of drought can secure long-term socio-economic benefits for people living in drylands and reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

• Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is an approach that counterbalances the expected loss of productive land with the recovery of degraded areas.

• Land tenure insecurity, especially for women, often prevents farmers from adopting sustainable land management practices

Indicator 2.4.1: Proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture
 

The impending close to the war in Syria brings to the fore the prospect of approximately 13 million forcibly displaced people considering returns to places of origin in the country. However the reattachment of people to their housing, land and property (HLP) faces a daunting set of challenges—the prospect of demographic change, the application of expropriation laws, confiscations and political agendas.

This one-pager provides details on the LAND-at-scale project in Burkina Faso. This project is implemented by Nitidae, Observatoire National du Foncier Burkina Faso (ONF-BF), Oxfam Burkina Faso, and financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency. 

The Global Programme 'Responsible Land Policy' (GPRLP) is part of the Special Initiative 'One World, No Hunger' of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which aims to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

The aim of this paper is to consolidate lessons from existing evidence that demonstrates the role of equitable access and tenure security to land in achieving sustainable food systems transformation, and subsequently, for the overall achievement of the SDGs. It makes the case of the importance of reforming and securing access and tenure rights to land and natural resources.

On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development.

Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. The vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel – as where large tracts of land are acquired not just for ‘more efficient farming’ or ‘food security’, but also to ‘alleviate pressure on forests’.

FAO is committed to reducing gender inequalities through its interventions, and this gender assessment has been produced as part of its broader efforts to generate evidence and knowledge in compliance with its Policy on Gender Equality. This assessment highlights the challenges, gaps and practices in the area of gender and agriculture and rural development in Georgia that need to be considered by policy-makers and project managers in their decision-making and their implementation of development interventions. The main gender inequalities in Georgia are reiterated in this assessment.

This one-pager provides details on the LAND-at-scale project in Vietnam. This project is implemented by Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) and RVO GRO, and financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency. 

The Gambos municipality is part of Angolamilk region. However milk;which is life sustaining in these communities;was found to be in short supply due to diminishing grazing pastures correlating with the introduction of commercial cattle ranches to the area. It is the impact of commercial ranches on pastoralists which has removed their buffer against droughts and thus dangerously threatened food security.