News archive 2009

Over 200 professional football clubs, 100 stadiums and millions of football fans will be involved in the first-ever Europe-wide football weekend against hunger being held from 20 to 22 March 2009.

Ten million new green jobs can be created by investing in sustainable forest management, according to FAO. As more jobs are lost due to the current economic downturn, sustainable forest management could become a means of creating millions of green jobs, thus helping to reduce poverty and improve the environment,” said Jan Heino, Assistant Director-General of FAO’s Forestry Department.

The President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, has received the Ceres Medal from FAO in honor of her country's progress in promoting agriculture in the fight against hunger. Chile is one of the countries which are on track to meeting the 1996 World Food Summit commitment to halve the number of people who suffer from hunger.

The 2006 conflict in Lebanon wrought enormous destruction on southern Lebanon, a mountainous region with rocky soils, well suited to the small-scale horticulture and livestock rearing that has been practised here for centuries. FAO and partners are working to help farmers get back on their feet.

The fishing industry and national fisheries authorities must do more to understand and prepare for the impacts that climate change will have on world fisheries, says FAO's new "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture" report.

Brazil has become the thirty-eighth country to become a Party to the FAO Agreement to Promote Compliance with International Conservation and Management Measures by Fishing Vessels on the High Seas.

With two-thirds of potential industrial wood production available from planted rather than naturally occuring forests, the contribution of planted forests has become increasingly critical to future wood supplies.

The 2008 rice bumper harvest is coming to a close with better than expected production that could help ease consumer prices. But the global economic slowdown could outweigh the gains for the poorest of the world's rice consumers.

Reducing fishing capacity and limiting access to shrimp fisheries, is likely to mitigate overfishing, bycatch and seabed destruction, some of the major economic and environmental side-effects of shrimp fishing. A new FAO report cites Australia's prawn fisheries and some cold-water shrimp fisheries as some of the best managed fisheries in the world.

Smaller plantings and adverse weather look likely to bring grain production down in most of the world’s major producers, according to a new FAO report.