Aquaculture is the fastest growing food producing sector in the world and it is expected to produce significant quantities of fish in the coming years to meet the growing global demand for aquatic animal products. The expansion and diversification of the sector, along with globalisation and trade liberalisation have resulted in aquatic animals and animal products moving around the world rapidly...

The only available data set on the catches of global fisheries are the official landings reported annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Attempts to detect and interpret trends in these data have been criticized as being both technically and conceptually flawed. Here, we explore and refute these claims. We show explicitly that trends in catch data are not...

World aquaculture is undergoing a massive expansion , both in quantity and quality of products and this is set to increase over the next few decades especially if aquaculture is to satisfy the world demand for fish products in the face of dwindling fisheries (FAO, 2002). Clearly, the industry needs to be sustainable in the medium to long term and considerable efforts are being made into underst...

Tropical forests have been recognized to play a multi-functional role by providing both goods (timber, food, medicine, etc.) and services, including recreational and spiritual benefits and climate regulation, making human life better [1,2]. The international debate has paid high attention to the potential of NTFPs in supporting livelihoods and forest conservation. The article by Peters et al. [...

There is no definition of globalization in a form universally accepted and perhaps not even final one. The reason is that globalization includes a multitude of complex processes, reaching different areas of society. It can be a phenomenon, an ideology, a strategy or all together. One thing is certain: globalization raises an endless polemic, progressing continuously and irreversibly generate ma...

2. At its Fourteenth Session (2013), the Commission endorsed the Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, contained in this document. The Genebank Standards were originally endorsed by the Commission in 1993. In 2009, the Commission requested FAO to revise the Genebank Standards in cooperation with the relevant international organizations to ensure up-to-date con...

Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå University, 90187 Umeå, Sweden Woods and Wayside International, Princeton, NJ, USA Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia d Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation, Kibale, Uganda e Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Yaounde, Cameroon f Technical Training and Research Centre for Development...

Capacity development is not a simple process which can be just described as a result of imparting knowledge or experience. It is definitely the result of interconnected factors which optimise synergies in the three dimensions of the country capacity system: policy/enabling environment, institutions, and individuals. The review of FAO good practices in capacity building attempted to contribute t...

Preventing the spread of disease through international movements is one of the key objectives of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). One of the ways it seeks to achieve this is by publishing international standards and guidelines aimed at, inter alia, preventing the importation of pathogens that are dangerous for animals and humans and strengthening Veterinary Services so that they ...

Since the demonstration, in 1998, of the phenomenon now widely known as 'fishing down marine food webs', and the publication of a critical rejoinder by Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) staff, a number of studies have been conducted in different parts of the world, based on more detailed data than the global FAO fisheries statistics originally used, which established the validity and ubi...