Women in agriculture are far from the end of poverty, zero hunger, quality education, and gender equality — some of the sustainable development goals that can be significantly improved if we achieve greater participation and better working conditions for women in agriculture.

Sustainable Public Food Procurement (PFP) represents a key game changer for food systems transformation. It can influence both food consumption and food production patterns. It can deliver multiple social, economic and environmental benefits towards sustainable food systems for healthy diets.

This publication aims to contribute to the improved understanding, dissemination and use of PFP as a development tool in particular in the case of school meals programmes.

The study assesses the farmers’ use of Global System for Mobile (GSM) for communication among farmers in agricultural extension programs in Taraba State, Nigeria. Specifically, the objectives include: identify key areas in which GSM are used for communication in agricultural extension programs activities, determine the frequency of usage of GSM for information exchange between farmers and extension personnel; and ascertain farmers’ satisfaction in the use of GSM in obtaining information in the various agricultural extension programs.

In this 90-minute webinar, Illuminating Hidden Harvests experts and authors share the rationale and methods behind the initiative and some of the progress and results so far. It includes a moderated roundtable discussion on how to leverage the methods, information and results from the IHH study towards improved policy decision making and in-country capacity for inter-disciplinary data collection and analysis.

While several studies have shown that genetically modified Bt cotton can benefit smallholder farmers economically, the sustainability of these effects is still unclear and debated controversially between biotechnology proponents and critics. We use unique panel data of 533 cotton farmers, collected in India between 2002 and 2008, to analyze Bt impacts on cotton yield, profit, and household living standards. Results from fixed effects models show that the adoption of Bt cotton is associated with a net yield gain of 24% and a profit increase of 50%.

Bees provide a critical link in the maintenance of ecosystems, pollination. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, enhancing forest regeneration, providing sustainability and adaptation to climate change and improving the quality and quantity of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops that produce fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality.

This note is a preview on the agricultural innovation systems (AIS) assessment methdology which is being tested in the nine countries of the European Union-funded TAP-AIS DeSIRA project. It presents the rationale, the steps, ethe expected outputs and outcomes.