Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan. Soils affect the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, our health and the health of all organisms on the planet. Without healthy soils we wouldn’t be able to...

The Global Symposium on Soil Pollution (GSOP18) will take place at FAO headquarters from 2 to 4 May 2018. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and its Global Soil Partnership (GSP), Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS), together with the Secretariats of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, UN Environment...

Solar powered irrigation systems are now an affordable and climate-friendly technology for both large and small-scale farmers in developing countries.  But they need to be adequately managed and regulated to avoid the risk of unsustainable water use, FAO stressed in a new report published today. Sharp and ongoing drops in the...

Global water use has increased by a factor of six over the past century, twice the rate of population growth, and its scarcity is now a looming human challenge due to a host of factors ranging from climate change and pollution to lack of capacity and infrastructure. In a video message...

Natural disasters are costing farmers in the developing world billions of dollars each year, with drought emerging as the most destructive in a crowded field of threats that also includes floods, forest fires, storms, plant pests, animal diseases outbreaks, chemical spills and toxic algal blooms. According to a new report from...

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established a vision for the future, which is as transformational as it is ambitious. They represent a determined agenda, intended to address an unprecedented confluence of pressures on human development and the global environment. Perhaps most importantly, the SDGs represent a strategy...

Interview series from the World Agricultures Watch International Workshop “Understanding Farming Diversity for Better Policy-making and Project Targeting” 19-20 December 2017, IFAD Headquarters, Rome, Italy

With the world needing to provide roughly 50 percent more food by 2050 – even as climate change, land degradation, watery scarcity and other challenges threaten productivity – it is clear that agricultural systems must transform. The problem is that no “one size fits all solution” exists, despite current policy designs...

Agriculture has a large role to play in reducing poverty in The Gambia. 30 percent of the country’s GDP comes from agriculture. It is the second largest sector in the economy and employs about 44 percent of the country’s active work force. Smallholder farmers supply 90 percent of the domestically...

Soil is where it all begins. Few people know that soils are a non-renewable resource. It takes over 1000 years to make 1 cm of soil. This means that in our lifetime, all the soil we see is all there is.  Soils do amazing things for us that we sometimes...