FAO has accorded food security and sustainable livelihood a high priority since the Rio Summit and more recently in response to the declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. On its part, the FAO Forestry Department in collaboration with partners, has launched a number of initiatives to assist developing countries, particularly those with low forest cover, designing and strengt...

Agroforestry is a science which has the potential to contribute to the improvement of rural livelihood. Due to capacity of its various forms, it offers multiple alternative and opportunities to the farmers to enhance farm production and income, while protecting the agricultural environment. The local inhabitants of Ladakh region, a Cold Arid Desert, have their traditional Agroforestry system wh...

This paper examines the contextual nature of gendered livelihood strategies through a comparative study of rural women=s producer groups in former homelands of South Africa and Appalachia. This comparative approach situates gendered livelihood strategies in distinct local contexts that are constituted by specific historical dynamics and cultural relations. Producer groups are defined here as co...

Introduction The world’s population has been growing rapidly in recent decades, and statistics show that most of the added population belongs to development countries. The majority of this population live in rural areas which has an unfavorable standard of living and livelihood compared to international standard. The basis of human and economic development is based on livelihood; livelihoods i...

This study looks at rural livelihoods in semi-arid and arid rural areas in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The decade-long socio-economic recession coupled with recurrent droughts presented a myriad of challenges to rural households in Zimbabwe. Taking Mudzi, a rural district in Zimbabwe, as a case study, the study explores the livelihood conditions and how households have managed to organize and cluster t...

Information and Communication technology (ICT) initiatives for rural development in India are not new. Many of these initiatives have shown mixed response. Most of these projects are incubated with government support. A development project to be sustainable, it should move from “supply-driven” concept to “demand driven” (citizen centric). Rural citizens deprived of infrastructural support and o...

Adapted from the author’s paper “How good enough biofuel governance can help rural livelihoods: making sure that biofuel development works for small farmers and communities”, an unpublished background paper for FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture 2008. Some suggestions on how to achieve biofuel development that favours sustainable rural livelihoods. The quest for sustainable biofuel systems has...

Given the uncertain future living of peasant households when they rent out farmland, the situation of livelihood assets is important for keeping sustainable livelihood. In this paper, the livelihood assets indicators were selected based on DFID’s sustainable livelihoods framework, and Monte Carlo method was adopted to establish the assessment model. The empirical study of peasant households sur...

concerned about slow progress in combating rural poverty, which is especially stark in the hillside areas.While both policymakers and donors are under strong pressure to provide adequate interventions, the government and its development partners have insufficient information about what drives sustainable rural productivity growth; they therefore have little guidance on how to prioritize expendi...

The word ‘ganyu’ is widely used in Malawi to describe a range of short-term rural labour relationships, the most common of which is piecework weeding or ridging on the fields of other smallholders, or on agricultural estates. Ganyu is a crucial poverty issue in Malawi because: • After own-farm production, ganyu is the most important source of livelihood for most poor households – for some it is...