Asia

The workshop on “Landscape approaches for mountain community sustainable development in a time of climate change: Policy consultation and South-South exchange” was organised by the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP, China), Asociación ANDES (Peru) and IIED, on 19-22 May 2016, in Lijiang and the Stone Village, Yunnan, China. The workshop brought together different stakeholders from China, Peru, the Albertine Rift region in Africa and UN agencies to explore the role of different community-led landscape approaches in agrobiodiversity conservation, climate resilience, with a particular focus on mountains. »

These four reports by the KIT are analysis of four maize seed systems in Malawi, Zambia, Bihar in India and Chiapas in Mexico. The four documents describe the adoption and impact of improved maize germplasm at small scale farmer level in these four areas. The objective is to understand whether smallholder farmers have access to seed of improved maize varieties, and if so, how the seed sector supports this. »

This article, published in the Environmental Research Letters journal, presents a map of mean agricultural area, classified by the amount of land per farming household, at subnational resolutions across three key global regions using a novel integration of household microdata and agricultural landscape data. These data meet a critical need, as improved understanding of the prevalence and distribution of smallholder farming is essential for effective policy development for food security, poverty reduction, and conservation agendas. »

This report assesses the extent to which inclusive business models promote women’s economic empowerment. As a commercially viable business model, inclusive business bears considerable potential for women’s economic advancement, though not every inclusive business will inevitably do so. It is important to distinguish two ways in which inclusive business is relevant to women’s economic empowerment. »

This publication assesses how to improve agricultural value chains, particularly value chains that include smallholders. Despite increasing use of innovation-system and value-chain approaches to promote rural income growth, poverty reduction, and greater gender equity, there is little systematic knowledge about how to operationalize value-chain approaches in different contexts and how best to evaluate innovation and value-chain development. This book consists of 14 papers that present results of recent work associated with CGIAR and its partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. »

This report by the Global Network For The Right To Food And Nutrition concludes that transnational corporations are monopolizing control over seeds with dire consequences for human rights and biodiversity. Increasingly, seed and agrochemical businesses seek to privatize, monopolize and control seeds by patenting and commodifying this very source of life. Meanwhile, peasant and indigenous communities, who have been the developers and guardians of seeds for millennia, are finding their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds overshadowed by a corporate agenda that prioritizes profit over human rights and the sustainable maintenance of nature. »