Laxmi Sunar wants to provide her daughter with the best possible education so that she can have a bright future. This is Laxmi’s dream; it is the dream that all mothers have for their children. Today though, Laxmi’s main concern is that her family has enough food to eat.

Said Touati lives with his 90-year-old mother in Tajerouine, northwestern Tunisia, a dry and remote area on the border with Algeria. It is an agricultural region without any major industries nearby.

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.

The terraced hills of the Andes, the rice paddies of southern China, the oasis systems of the Maghreb: agriculture molds landscapes and places. Agriculture also shapes livelihoods, lifestyles, food traditions and cultures. What kind of plants grow or can’t grow, how they are harvested and what people eat define people’s lives.  Because our natural resources are under great strain, we need [...]

Kalu, in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia, is home to 28-year-old Yimam Ali. However, many young people from this region of Ethiopia move to the Middle East looking for work and a better life. The amount of job opportunities in the country has not matched its growth. 71 percent of Ethiopia’s population is under the age of 30 and many [...]

Eradicating world hunger can only be achieved if food is safe, nutritious and of good quality. Eating unsafe food increases the chances of contracting diseases and can be, in some cases, deadly. Unsafe food can also lead to rejections causing food to be wasted, which then impacts on food security. One thing is certain: there can be no food security [...]

Last year, Ashmita Thapa’s husband left their hometown in southern Nepal to find work in Saudi Arabia. He had been working as a farmer and used to be able to grow enough food for the family. But now, Ashmita explains, the yields are poorer and poorer. “This is a part of climate change,” she adds. “There isn’t as much rain as [...]

Hassan Al-Hassan, a Syrian farmer known to locals as Abu Hasan, remembers how difficult it had been in the past few years in the village of al-Rabeha in the southern governorate of Homs. “Due to lack of water, we could hardly produce anything,” said Abu Hasan. FAO is helping to restore access to water for over 40 000 families – about [...]

Ghost fishing. Sounds eerie, right? Unfortunately, it is indeed as eerie as it sounds. Ghost fishing occurs when lost or abandoned fishing gear stays in the ocean and traps fish or other marine life, indiscriminately killing whatever it catches. Abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG), as it is known officially, is being recognized as a topic that we must [...]

Smiley and energetic, Christine lives in the semi-arid region of Karamoja in north-east Uganda. Her husband passed away some time ago and she is now taking care of her six children on her own. Christine struggled in managing her household and securing the basic needs for her children. “I was permanently asking somebody for something,” she describes. Agriculture had always been [...]

Everything we do at FAO aims at ensuring a better future. Sure, we need to tackle the huge food and environmental challenges we face today. But we always keep an eye on what that means for tomorrow. More than just quick fixes, we look for sustainable solutions that will benefit generations to come. The future of our world depends on today’s [...]

Women and children, especially pregnant women and children 0-2 years of age, are among the groups most vulnerable to food insecurity and chronic malnutrition. This is no different in Mozambique where, according to the FAO Technical Secretariat for Food Security and Nutrition 35% of the population is food insecure and 43% of children under 5 are chronically malnourished. Chronic undernutrition levels [...]

When approaching the small house, Hanen can be seen laughing with her family in the yard. Hanen is a 25-year-old biologist living in Ouled Taleb, Siliana, one of several areas in North West Tunisia that are particularly hard-hit by unemployment, low income and high rates of migration. Hanen comes from a poor rural family, who invested in their children’s education [...]

The digital revolution has changed the way we work, access information and connect with each other. It offers opportunities to those who can use the new technologies, but also presents new challenges for those who are left behind. Often referred to collectively as Information and Communications Technologies or ICTs, these technologies are any method of electronically sharing or storing data: telephones, [...]

Schools are an ideal setting for teaching basic skills in food, nutrition and health. In many communities, they may be the only place where children acquire these important life skills. Primary schools, in particular, are suitable vehicles for nutrition education. They not only influence children but also target girls, who tend to leave schools earlier. Nutrition lessons can be simple, [...]

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What word comes to mind when you think of “cities”? Busy? And when you think of “forests”? Peaceful? What if cities could be something different? To date, cities have largely been problematic for the environment. They occupy just two percent of the world’s land. However, they account for over 60 percent of global energy consumption, 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions [...]

Knocking on closed doors is something Renu Bala is very good at. First, it was the doors of her neighbours in Panjor Bhanga, her home village in northern Bangladesh. She had an idea for them: what if they formed a milk cooperative? They didn’t have much to lose. “The women of this village are very poor and raise only local Deshi cattle,” Renu explains. [...]

“The anniversary of my brother’s death is on the 26 of July. He was killed 27 years ago,” says Robinson Salas. Robinson is one of the millions of people who had been displaced from their homes and their lands by the armed conflict between the Government of Colombia and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel group. This 52-year [...]

More with less. This is the challenge and the mantra for our future. There will be many more of us in the years to come. We will go from a population of 7.6 billion today to 9.8 billion in 2050; yet, with our current rate of usage, there will be less fresh water, less arable soil, less available land for [...]

Aquaponics has become all the trend. The combination of aquaculture, the practice of fish farming, and hydroponics, the cultivation of plants in water without soil, aquaponics is one example of recirculating systems generally called Integrated Aquaculture Agriculture (IAA). Some integrated farms can reduce water consumption by 90% compared to traditional agriculture. This is very good news for the agriculture sector, [...]

After days and days of heavy rain, Hernan Espinoza looked out over his fields. They were waterlogged, some completely destroyed. He was like many others in his small community of Tambogrande on Peru’s northern coast: grappling with devastation, their farms and fields severely damaged by flooding, storms and landslides, caused by the El Niño Costero (coastal) phenomenon that pounded the [...]

One person has curly hair; one person has straight hair. One person tans, another burns. One person can curl her lip, another can’t. This is all because of our genes and the differences in them. Diversity. It is the spice of life.  

27-year-old Amiat Ahmed and her two-year-old son live with Amiat’s parents in the South Wollo Zone of Amhara Region, Ethiopia. Like many other young people in her region, Amiat used to feel that there were limited opportunities to earn income in her village, which led to her decision to migrate to Saudi Arabia.  

With the health of our oceans at stake, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing has quickly become a monumental problem. The term “IUU fishing” is used for any fishing activities that operate outside of the law. There are many types of IUU fishing, for example, fishing without license or authorization, not accurately reporting the fish caught, fishing in prohibited areas [...]

Many of us look back on our childhoods with warm feelings. But for more than 150 million girls and boys between the ages of 5 and 17 around the world, childhood means something else: poverty, a lack of education and working long hours in dangerous conditions.  

Oceans cover 70 percent of our planet. But did you know that 40 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by what is known as our common oceans?  

Elvis Cortés Hernández grabs his lunch and sits down with his friends. We’re at the General Lázaro Cárdenas school in Ajalpan, deep in the heart of Mexico’s Puebla province and the ten–year–old is chatting about the school’s vegetable garden, one element of its progressive food policy. “I like to eat in the school dining room because they give me carrots, [...]

Where would you find the world’s largest recreation center and the most natural supermarket? Forests wouldn’t have been your first answer, would it? That’s the thing about forests. They keep secrets.

What does William Shakespeare have in common with Mexican beekeeper Francisco Lenin Bartolo Reyes? Both men understand the importance of the honey bee, a small but invaluable ally of the human race.

Imagine living in one of the driest areas on the planet. What little rain there is falls over the space of a few months, yielding around 700 mm in total each year. A population of 1.2 million has to survive on 65 percent less water than the rest of their compatriots, on a traditional staple diet of corn and beans. [...]

Diets vary greatly from place to place based on food availability, eating habits and culture. Yet, when it comes to food, there is a lot that we know about what is and what is not good for us and this is true no matter where we live. Societal changes, however, are making these choices more complicated. While many countries are [...]

Disasters, like an earthquake or a violent coup d’état, can strike suddenly, or like droughts and floods, develop slowly. Emergencies are devastating for people everywhere, but for those whose livelihoods or food needs depend entirely on agriculture and natural resources, these disasters can often be overwhelming. FAO addresses emergencies in a variety of ways from early warning and preparedness to [...]

Youth around the world are increasingly turning away from agriculture. Traditionally requiring tough manual labour and offering low wages, agriculture does not often appeal to new generations who generally prefer to try their luck finding jobs in cities.  

Four years into the 2030 Agenda, there is still a large gap in data to understand where the world stands in achieving its shared goals, the SDGs. To support [...]

The latest edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World will be launched on Monday 15 July 2019 during a special event on the [...]

Four years into the 2030 Agenda and there is a pressing need to understand where the world stands in eradicating hunger and food insecurity, as well as ensuring sustainable [...]

A review of FAO’s fight against hunger and malnutrition and challenges ahead with the participation of José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of FAO. 

Where: Sheikh Zayed Centre at FAO headquarters 

When: Friday, 26th [...]

The 2019 Report of the Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) examines the role of the TCP to deliver FAO technical assistance for agriculture, food and nutrition in response to countries’ most [...]

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