The productivity of tropical agricultural commodities is affected by the health of the ecosystem. Shade tolerant crops such as coffee and cocoa benefit from environmental services provided by forested landscapes, enabling landscape design that meets biodiversity conservation and economic needs. What can motivate farmers to apply and maintain such landscape approaches? Rather than rely on a prol...

Global hunger is on the rise (FAO, 2009). The number of those that are undernourished has increased steadily over the past decade reaching 1.02 billion people in 2009 (FAO, 2009), and remaining near this total over the past two years. The Millennium Development Goal to reduce world hunger by half by 2015 will likely not be met with current observed trends according to a recent UN report on food...

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations launched a global partnership initiative for the conservation and adaptive management of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) in 2002. China is one of the first countries that responded to the GIAHS initiative, witnessed by the designation of Qingtian Rice-Fish Culture by FAO in June 2005. It is also the first country t...

FAO has accorded food security and sustainable livelihood a high priority since the Rio Summit and more recently in response to the declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. On its part, the FAO Forestry Department in collaboration with partners, has launched a number of initiatives to assist developing countries, particularly those with low forest cover, designing and strengt...

World food and agricultural production will have to increase substantially if the demand created by the combination of growing populations and rising incomes is to be met. Large-scale improvements in technology are needed if production targets are to be reached. But now that energy is so expensive, the new agricultural techniques and technologies must be as energy-efficient as possible. Researc...

Diet, nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases: report of a joint WHO/FAO expert consultation, Geneva, 28 January-1 February 2002.

In the present paper I shall try to discuss the ideas and principles underlying the estimates of human energy requirements proposed by a consultative group set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization and United Nations University, that met in Rome in October 1981 (FAO/WHO/UNU, 1985). I shall only consider adults, since Whitehead (1986) discusses the requirements o...

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food producing sector in the world and it is expected to produce significant quantities of fish in the coming years to meet the growing global demand for aquatic animal products. The expansion and diversification of the sector, along with globalisation and trade liberalisation have resulted in aquatic animals and animal products moving around the world rapidly...

The only available data set on the catches of global fisheries are the official landings reported annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Attempts to detect and interpret trends in these data have been criticized as being both technically and conceptually flawed. Here, we explore and refute these claims. We show explicitly that trends in catch data are not...

World aquaculture is undergoing a massive expansion , both in quantity and quality of products and this is set to increase over the next few decades especially if aquaculture is to satisfy the world demand for fish products in the face of dwindling fisheries (FAO, 2002). Clearly, the industry needs to be sustainable in the medium to long term and considerable efforts are being made into underst...