Knowledge Portal

This book focuses on how food security and resilience can improve smallholder and subsistence farming and how integration of gender can accommodate this. Through the integration of gender analysis into resilience thinking, this book shares field-based research insights from a collaborative, integrated project aimed at improving food security in subsistence and smallholder agricultural systems. The scope of the book is both local and multi-scalar. The gendered resilience framework, illustrated with detailed case studies from semi-arid Kenya, is shown to be suitable for use in analysis in other geographic regions and across disciplines. »

This report focuses on the wider health impacts of future changes in agricultural production. While much research focuses on questions on food security, less attention has been devoted to assessing the health impacts. In this modelling study, the authors estimate that the health impacts of climate change from changes in dietary and weight related risk factors could be significant, and exceed other climate-related health impacts that have been estimated. »

This paper (PDF) in Agriculture & Food Security focuses on how households cope with food shortages and how these food coping strategies vary along the urban–rural continuum. In peri-urban and rural areas, gathering of wild food and selling of charcoal was widely practiced, while in urban areas, most households tended to reduce the number of »

This paper by Practical Action uses the three pillars of Technology Justice (access, local innovation, and sustainable use of technologies) to assess the range of agricultural development pathways available. This policy briefing presents existing evidence and research in agroecology alongside case studies of successful initiatives with scalable potential, particularly where market systems are at the core of development practices. »

This blog adresses the new market opportunities for small-scale farmers. The author argues that the demand from urban consumers who are buying food from newly available chain stores is swelling and huge quantities of food are bought in supermarkets. While innovations in urban or vertical farms have a niche role to play, the overwhelming majority of this food will be sourced domestically from rural areas. As such, growing urban markets offer a significant new economic opportunity for farmers. »

This report tries to respond to key concerns related to addressing gender equity in coffee supply chains and to share learning on challenges and best practices. It proposes recommendation for individual companies, public-private partnerships and the coffee industry as a whole, to create a foundation for industry-wide collaboration towards a more resilient coffee supply chain through greater gender equity. Women do much of the work on smallholder coff­ee farms, however, despite their contributions they are often excluded from decision-making processes and have less access to resources. »