Despite the importance of international trade as an engine for economic growth and development, only fourteen of the twenty-two Arab states are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The remaining Arab states risk missing out on opportunities for greater integration into the global economy and the multilateral trading system facilitated by the WTO.
At the 64th sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB64) under the UNFCCC in Bonn, Germany, the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP) underscored the importance of ethically and equitably incorporating indigenous values and knowledge and local knowledge systems such as pastoralism into climate policies and actions ahead of the 31st Conference of Parties on climate change (COP31).
An international academic partnership is helping turn one of Laikipia County’s most destructive and invasive plants, the prickly pear cactus (
Opuntia stricta), into a source of food security and clean energy while also helping end perennial resource conflict in the region.
As FAO coordinates the implementation of the
International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026, gender team leader Tacko Ndiaye discusses why investing in Africa’s women farmers is essential for food security, economic growth and creating more resilient agrifood systems
Monsoon season in South Asia, including Nepal, is a period of frequent rainfall, extreme heat, and a busy time of the year for farmers. Most farmers in Nepal depend on monsoon rain to plant paddey, the main source of food.
Farmers today are producing food under pressures that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. Input costs are rising and supply chains are unreliable. Water is scarcer. Weather is less predictable. And for a growing number of farmers — in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Myanmar, in Gaza — the challenge is producing food at all, in the middle of active conflict. These are not marginal conditions. They describe the reality facing hundreds of millions of people who grow the food the world depends on.
A team of universities, led by Addis Ababa University, has joined forces to implement a four-year Intra-Africa academic mobility project aimed at strengthening agroforestry research and education for climate change mitigation.
Animal disease is no longer a distant concern for farmers and veterinarians alone. It is increasingly visible in household budgets: global egg prices surged
more than 60% during recent bird flu outbreaks. In South Africa, foot-and-mouth disease pushed beef prices up by 34%. These are not isolated fluctuations in price. They are reminders that when prevention falls short, families, farmers and food systems all pay the price.
Smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia are likely to still be reeling from the fuel and fertilizer crisis caused by conflict in the Middle East when what forecasters expect to be a “super” El Niño arrives later this year.
Across the United States, record-breaking extreme weather events have already occurred, including
severe storms and
Tornadoes in the State of
Illinois to flooding in
Texas,
southern Wisconsin and the
South. Throughout the summer and the remainder of the growing season, additional severe weather events will come through, including several hurricanes and tropical storms beginning with
Tropical Storm Arthur.
Before anyone called her an innovator, before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, before solar-powered cold rooms, before the language of sustainable development, Shifra Ainomugisha knew food loss in its painful form.
It is barely noon, and a group of women sit near the beach on the outskirts of Djégbadji village, in West Africa’s Benin, sifting through mounds of salt harvested from the Gulf of Guinea’s ocean.
Armed conflict, economic shocks, and climate pressures are driving worsening food insecurity across many of the world's most vulnerable regions, according to the latest
Hunger Hotspots report outlook for June-November 2026, jointly released by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Nearly nine years after the violent persecution of the Rohingya minority population in Myanmar and the following mass exodus of refugees, over 1.2 million Rohingya currently reside in neighbouring Bangladesh, where they face immense challenges. With the United Nations (UN) recording significant shortfalls in global humanitarian funding, alongside Bangladesh’s diminishing ability to support these populations, experts warn of a deepening humanitarian crisis.
Long burdened by the labour-intensive nature of agriculture, Zimbabwe's female farmers are finding relief in new agritechnologies that significantly reduce the time they spend in the field.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has approved USD 6.4 million for a new conservation initiative in Papua New Guinea that seeks to protect 700,000 hectares of critical highland ecosystems by placing Indigenous Peoples and local communities at the centre of conserving and managing their ancestral lands.
As ministers, diplomats and development officials assembled in Samarkand Congress Centre for a ceremonial family photograph, the mood carried unusual symbolism. Behind the smiles and formalities stood a region confronting a harder reality: rivers are shrinking, soils are tiring, temperatures are rising, and the old ways of managing land and water are no longer working.
In Yemen, increasing funding constraints on humanitarian operations have put millions of civilians in dire need of life-saving assistance amid overlapping crises. Acute food insecurity is a persistent issue, as recent reports from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) give a stark warning of conditions without urgent intervention.
Dharashiv is one of the poorest districts in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Located in the semi-arid region of Marathwada, it has no major river and is not blessed with good reservoirs.
Over the past few years, the humanitarian crisis in Africa’s Sahel region has expanded considerably, largely driven by a surge of violence—particularly in the Central Sahel. Although the crisis has been described by the United Nations (UN) as having “largely faded from the headlines” since its wake in 2012, millions of people across the region are in dire need of humanitarian assistance as civilian displacement, climate shocks, and widespread hunger rapidly spill across borders.
Recent geopolitical trends threaten more food crises, especially in developing countries. A new IPES-Food report urges a strategy of ‘resilient self-reliance’, proposing available opportunities to improve equity, sustainability and solidarity.