News archive 2009

FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf welcomes the G8’s $20 billion Food Security Initiative as an encouraging policy shift in favour of the poor and hungry.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission concluded a week-long meeting and adopted more than 30 new international standards, codes of practice and guidelines to improve worldwide food safety and protect the health of consumers.

While the Western Balkans are seeing healthy economic growth overall, rural areas are falling behind, according to a new FAO-World Bank report. Agricultural trade deficits are widening, climate change is putting pressure on agricultural resources, and young people are increasingly migrating to urban areas or abroad in search of economic opportunities.

High food insecurity persists in Zimbabwe in spite of improvements in agricultural production and a more liberal import policy this year, according to a new FAO/WFP report.

An international Red Locust emergency campaign in Eastern and Southern Africa has succeeded in containing a massive locust outbreak in Tanzania. It is the first time that biopesticides are being used on a large scale in Africa against locusts.

A vast stretch of African savannah land that spreads across 25 countries has the potential to turn several African nations into global players in bulk commodity production, according to a study just published by FAO and the World Bank.

World hunger is projected to reach a historic high in 2009 with 1 020 million people going hungry every day, according to new estimates published by FAO.

Because food is a basic necessity, the agriculture sector is showing more resilience to the global economic crisis than other industries. But the risks could increase if the economic downturn deepens, according to a new OECD/FAO report.

On the first-ever UN World Oceans Day FAO has published a set of technical guidelines aimed at helping the fisheries sector reduce its impacts on fragile deep-sea fish species and ecosystems. The guidelines provide a framework that countries can use to manage deep sea fisheries in high-seas areas outside of national jurisdictions.

FAO Director General Jacques Diouf calls for a strengthened global governance system for international food security at the World Grain Forum in St Petersburg, Russia.