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Current support to agricultural producers is harmful for the environment and human health, while disadvantaging women and smallholder farmers, says a new UN report published on September 14. This support is steering us away from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goals of the Paris Agreement. But we can redirect agricultural subsidies to […]

The upcoming UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) is not the people’s summit it claims to be because key elements such as human rights, equity and accountability are not on the agenda, according to a leading UN rights expert. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, says that the summit turns a

The United Nations has issued an urgent appeal to scale up humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan as a worsening drought threatens the livelihoods of more than 7 million farmers. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned on August 28 that food production and agricultural livelihoods are under extreme pressure due to the combination of severe

Global warming has “unequivocally” been caused by human activities and many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level, climate scientists have warned. According to the latest report launched by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The Pre-Summit to this year’s UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) has kicked off in Rome today, accompanied by fierce criticism from hundreds of civil society organizations. More than 300 NGOs are boycotting the event that will be held from July 26 to 28 because they fear that the summit is disproportionately influenced by corporate actors

World hunger worsened dramatically in 2020 largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a report released on Monday by five UN agencies, up to 811 million people, or almost a tenth of the global population, were chronically undernourished last year. After remaining virtually unchanged for five years, the so-called ‘prevalence of undernourishment’ increased from

More than 800 international organisations, NGOs, farming groups and food experts have issued a call for true sustainability in agriculture. They want agroecology, organic, and regenerative agriculture to top the agenda at this year’s UN Food Systems Summit and have warned against ‘greenwashing’ and the lack of transparency on the road to the summit. On

Additional efforts in the agricultural and food sector are urgently needed in order to meet global food security and environmental targets, according to a new report released on Monday by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Although progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Global progress against child labour has stalled for the first time in 20 years. The number of children in child labour has risen to 160 million worldwide, with millions more at risk due to the impacts of COVID-19, according to new global estimates for 2020. This is reversing the previous downward trend that saw child

World food prices jumped in May by nearly 40% compared to the same period last year, reaching their highest value since more than a decade, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has warned. The FAO Food Price Index, which measures monthly changes in international prices of a basket of food commodities,