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Importance of soil biodiversity remains ‘largely underestimated’

The importance of below-ground biodiversity, as well as its complex interaction with the above-ground world, is often overlooked, according to a recent UN report. Soil is not only vital to agriculture but essential for clean water and maintaining biodiversity.

Bringing together Agriculture and Biodiversity

Agriculture and biodiversity are currently both in the spotlights, but mostly as opposites. This must change, but how? A new EU project will investigate how agriculture and biodiversity can best go hand in hand and what this brings in return for the farmer as well as for biodiversity.

South Africa: Food and Clean Water Start With Soil Biodiversity - Learning More About It Is Urgent

Although soils are vital for agriculture, biodiversity and clean water, this below-ground world is often overlooked. The loss of life below the ground due to intensification of agriculture, climate change, erosion and compaction, among other things, is one of the biggest global threats to soils.

Pathways to sustainable land use and food systems

The findings of a new report by the Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use, and Energy (FABLE) Consortium, suggest that integrated strategies across food production, biodiversity, climate, and diets can meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

FAO to support Iran to ensure sustainable healthy biodiverse soils

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) representative to Iran Gerold Bödeker, reaffirms the Organization’s stance to support Iran in developing and adopting policies and programs promoting sustainable agricultural systems and nurturing soil biodiversity.

World Soil Day 2020

5 December 2020, Rome, Italy

World Soil Day celebration at Muresk

The Muresk Institute will host a free, farmer-focused event for World Soil Day this Saturday. A United Nations International Day of Significance, World Soil Day highlights the importance of healthy soil and advocates for its sustainable management.

165th session of the FAO Council

30 November - 4 December 2020, Rome, Italy

Biodiversity is crucial for South Africa’s food security

The Covid-19 pandemic is teaching us all some very important lessons. In particular, it is reminding us that our health, our economy and our way of life are built on a fragile foundation that is far too often taken for granted.

Namibia: Agriculture and the Ecosystems

Agriculture is concerned with rearing animals and the cultivation of crops whilst an ecosystem simply refers to a community of living organisms such as plants and animals together with the non-living components such as the air and soils, interacting with each other in their environment.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2020: Overcoming water challenges in agriculture

More than three billion people live in agricultural areas with high to very high levels of water shortages and scarcity, and almost half of them face severe constraints. Furthermore, available freshwater resources per person have declined by more than 20 percent over the past two decades, unders ...

Our Thanksgiving Menu has Lost a Few Crops

The modern Thanksgiving plate has turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and — of course — pumpkin pie. But long before Thanksgiving, there were other agricultural plants in the Americas. Those domesticated crops are now extinct. Scientists, like Dr. Logan Kistler, Curator of Archaeobotany at the Smi ...

The dark side of Italian hazelnut farming

As Italian hazelnut plantations expand to cater to our love of chocolate and nougat, they are leaving a bitter aftertaste on local soil, water and air.As the early morning mist clears to reveal the turrets of San Quirico Castle in central Italy, the greenery surrounding local farmhouses comes al ...

Eat like it matters: how your food choices can clean up the planet and feed the world

Food is why we’re all here. It sustains life, spreads joy and brings us together.But if we are to feed 10 billion people in a healthy way within planetary boundaries, the way in which we produce and consume food needs to change.

Why small farms are key to the future of food – and how we can support them

In the 25 years since Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation,” much has been written about the benefits of shaking up established business practices. Even before the current pandemic, there was a growing recognition that our food systems, too, needed to be reimagined.

Table for 10 Billion? Leaders to Unlock More Sustainable and Equitable Food Future

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated vulnerabilities in food systems – highlighting the insecurity of rural livelihoods, the tragedy of food waste, and stark inequities in access to healthy food. As the global population races to 10 billion, more needs to be done to feed the planet while tackling ...

Sustainable Soil Management with Spectroscopy

Modern agricultural research is focused on how to feed the future population of the world. Year on year, farmers aim to generate a greater amount of food from the same resources and quickly changing environmental conditions only increase the pressure for international food supply.

Kenya: Root Vegetables - Kenyan Schools Embrace Indigenous Foods

Today, when students file into the lunchroom at Mundika High School in western Kenya, they are greeted by a spread of nutritious local vegetables with exotic-sounding names, like spider plant. But that wasn't always the case. Just a few years ago, that fare had largely disappeared from Kenyan pl ...

Plant biodiversity suffers without livestock grazing, says expert

On the back of a recent European Commission-funded report which called for nuance in the livestock vs environment debate, EURACTIV took a look at the importance of EU grasslands and the role of livestock in maintaining them.The report, published in October, comes amidst increasing debates over t ...

Assessing agroforestry practices and soil and water conservation for climate change adaptation in Kenya: A cost-benefit analysis

The study was carried out under the Integrating Agricultural Sectors into National Adaptation Plans programme, with the aim of capacity building, generating evidence-based results for selecting adaptation options, and informing adaptation policy dialogues on adaptation in agriculture.

What the limits of traditional accounting mean for the future of food

Traditional accounting methods do not fully capture the externalized costs of economic activities in the food and agricultural space, and this shortcoming is becoming more apparent because climate change is intensifying the focus on sustainable development. Against this backdrop, some industry o ...

Nature-inspired solutions to sustainably increase crop yield

GAIN4CROPS is developing novel disruptive technologies to overcome one of the main constraints of photosynthesis: the photorespiration, a process that reduces CO2 assimilation efficiency, and thus biomass yield and agricultural productivity.

FAO to help farmers acquire land titles for food production

Farmers especially those on customary land, have failed to get access to capital from financial institutions, due to lack of security such as land titles, to boost their agricultural ventures.

Wild Olives Provide a Healthy Oil Source

The oil obtained from the fruit of wild olive trees has excellent sensory, physicochemical and nutritional stability characteristics, according to an article published in the journal Antioxidants.

Mind-boggling variety’: the food crusaders preserving India’s heritage

A small army of botanical heritage enthusiasts is spearheading a m ovement in India for the revival and preservation of the country’s rapidly vanishing food biodiversity by bringing back the rich crop varieties that thrived in the past, but are now on the verge of extinction.

Statement by Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity, on the occasion of World Food Day

Statement by Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity, on the occasion of World Food Day

World Food Day 2020

16 October 2020, Rome, Italy

11th session of the Intergovernmental Technical Working Group on Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITWG-AnGR/11) at FAO

1 - 3 July 2020, Rome, Italy

164th Session of the FAO Council

8 - 12 June 2020, Rome, Italy

8th session of the Global Soil Partnership Plenary Assembly (FAO)

4 - 5 June 2020, Rome, Italy

Global Symposium on Soil Biodiversity (FAO)

1 - 3 June 2020, Rome, Italy

A Light at the End of the Covid Tunnel?

In farming and food systems, as in every other avenue of public life, context is everything, as I said during a discussion on Al Jazeera’s ‘Inside Story’, this past Thursday.

Experts apply microbiome research to agricultural science to increase crop yield

The global demand and consumption of agricultural crops is increasing at a rapid pace. According to the 2019 Global Agricultural Productivity Report, global yield needs to increase at an average annual rate of 1.73 percent to sustainably produce food, feed, fiber and bioenergy for 10 billion peo ...

The pandemic is just another sign of our broken food system

As many as 265 million people around the world are suffering from food insecurity and possible starvation, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Food Programme has warned of widespread famines “of Biblical proportions” and its latest report is a stark reminder of the disconnects in our ...

Crops sown in a uniform spatial pattern produce higher yields and reduce environmental impact

Higher yields and fewer weeds are possible if farmers sow wheat, maize, soy and other crops in more uniform spatial patterns, according to University of Copenhagen researchers. More precise sowing can also help reduce herbicide use and fertilizer runoff.

Fairtrade Africa supports alliance on climate action and living incomes in cocoa regions

This year, as the world celebrates World Earth Day on the 22nd April 2020, Fairtrade Africa is highlighting its stakeholder collaboration towards climate action. Environmental degradation and climate change in the last couple of decades have reached alarming levels and global action is urgently ...

Agricultural economist evaluates research results on food security

Plant breeding has considerably increased agricultural yields in recent decades and thus made a major contribution to combating global hunger and poverty. At the same time, however, the intensification of farming has had negative environmental effects. Increases in food production will continue ...

Build diverse food systems for post-COVID-19 world

The spread of COVID-19 across the globe has led to never-before-experienced lockdown situations—which in turn are having a significant impact across agricultural systems—threatening food security for increasing numbers of people around the world.

How COVID-19 affects farmers and the food supply chain

Empty shelves lining supermarkets, farmers dumping milk and abandoning fields of crops, restaurants laying off staff—the American food landscape has changed dramatically in just a month, thanks to stay-at-home advisories and social distancing in the age of COVID-19.

The importance of the (wild) bee and what you can do to help!

The bee is a special creature: of great importance for the conservation of biodiversity and our food. But why does the bee play such an important role and what can you do to help it? Nienke Vennik – editor for Slow Food Netherlands – interviewed a local beekeeper and found out.

UAE wages war on tiny scourge threatening date palms

Said Al-Ajani looks proudly over his lush date plantation, which recently survived a plague of red weevils—a destructive insect wreaking havoc across the Middle East and North Africa.

[Commentary] Covid-19 and food security: Lessons for Indian Agriculture

I started my post-graduate work on potato in 1947 at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, I had witnessed the damage to the potato crop by a disease called late blight (caused by Phytophthora infestans) in the Nilgiri Hills.

Business as usual is no longer an option

There are currently no lack of visitors at Eosta, the market leader in the European organic fruit and vegetable sector. "The turnover is exploding and organic fruit and vegetables are in high demand. We have seen this often in times of crisis, the demand for bio is growing exponentially. In one ...

The forward movement of organic growth

When Antony John first started growing organic produce on a quarter acre of land for restaurants near his farm in Stratford, Ontario, he met with the perplexed reactions of loan officers at the bank. “They were willing to lend us money, but you had to prove yourself to them every year with a cas ...

WATCH: Why farmers should take climate change seriously

When it comes to climate change there is no doubt – Mzansi’s agricultural community has seen it all. From increasing floods to devastating droughts. As if that’s not enough, our farmers are in constant combat with another threat – pests or disease outbreaks.

Plant disease: UK restricts olive tree imports to halt infection

Severe restrictions will be placed on imports of some very popular trees and plants in an effort to halt a deadly infection. Xylella fastidiosa has wreaked havoc on olive plantations in parts of Italy and has also been found in France and Spain. To prevent the disease spreading to the UK, import ...

COVID-19 is wake up call for global food systems, say experts

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has exposed a crisis in the global food system, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) — a panel of developmental economists, agronomists, nutritionists and sociologists from 18 countries — said in April 2020.

Returning land to nature with high-yield farming

The expansion of farmlands to meet the growing food demand of the world's ever expanding population places a heavy burden on natural ecosystems. A new IIASA study however shows that about half the land currently needed to grow food crops could be spared if attainable crop yields were achieved gl ...

Healthier climate: Fava beans could replace soy

Tofu, soy milk and veggie mince. More and more Danes are opting to supplement or completely replace their consumption of animal-based proteins with plant-based proteins. Climate considerations are part of their reasoning.