News

Representatives of ten civil society organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean met FAO Director-General  during the Regional Conference this week in Santiago de Chile, to discuss about civil society contributions to South-South Cooperation, climate change,  land access and food sovereignty. The representative from the Latin American Agro-ecological Movement (MAELA, in Spanish), highlighted the Regional Conference as a formal space for the dialogue and  the positioning of civil society before the Goverments of the region, more specifically, of the small-scale food producers of the region. Graziano da Silva stressed the importance of deepening the dialogue between civil society and...

Tackling the world’s massive food loss problem is a key to reducing hunger and poverty, but governments and companies must step up their collaboration on the issue, an international congress on food losses and waste heard today.Speaking at the 2nd SAVE FOOD International Congress in Düsseldorf, FAO Assistant Director-General Ren Wang underlined that effective coordination across all sectors could make “a real difference” to one of the world’s major food security challenges.While 842 million people suffer from chronic hunger, around 1.3 billion tonnes of food is lost or wasted every year. FAO estimates that the food...

The National Geographic Society and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are teaming up to raise awareness on food and agriculture issues as National Geographic, a U.S.-based nonprofit institution, begins an eight-month, in-depth report on food issues starting with a May cover story in National Geographic magazine and online atNatGeoFood.com.The official launch of the collaboration will be marked by a three-day event taking place 2-4 May 2014 at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., beginning May 2 with an afternoon panel discussion, Food: A Forum, which will highlight issues of food security...

FAO and the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) are joining forces to promote wider global sharing of agricultural information and better highlight FAO’s activities in specialized agricultural media worldwide. An agreement signed today by FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva and IFAJ President Markus Rediger outlines various joint activities to be undertaken by the Organization and the 3,000+ journalists represented by the 32 national associations that form the IFAJ. The partnership aims at enhancing knowledge exchange and content publishing related to global hunger and food security, nutrition, sustainable development and the responsible management of fishery and forestry...

A new programme worth €33 million to improve land governance and help improve the food and nutrition security of family farmers and vulnerable communities in Sub Saharan Africa, was announced today by the European Union’s Development Commissioner, Andris Piebalgs. This will be done, among other things, through the application, at country level, of some Voluntary Guidelines set up by the international community in 2012 to improve land governance.  Roughly 1.2 billion people worldwide live without permanent homes, land access or formal property rights, a reason which is often used for their land to be attributed to large scale land investors. Therefore,...