Addressing Seed Security In Disaster Response

This report contains papers given to a FAO workshop meeting, held in Rome in May 2003, organised to consider how to improve the effectiveness of seed relief schemes to promote sustainable development and food security, to identify gaps in the development of tools, guidance and methodologies, and to make recommendations for further collaborative work. It includes case studies of seed relief activities in several African countries.

This book examines the effects of high and volatile food prices during 2007-08 on low-income farmers and consumers in developing, transition, and industrialized countries. Previous studies of this crisis have mostly used models to estimate the likely impacts. This volume includes actual evidence from the field as to how higher prices affected access to food and farm income among poor people. In addition to country and regional case studies, the book presents discussions of cross-cutting themes, including gender, risk management, violence, the importance of subsistence farming as a coping strategy, and the role of governments and markets in addressing higher prices. With 2011 witnessing an unprecedentedly high level of food prices, the findings and policy recommendations presented here should prove useful to both scholars and policy makers in understanding the causes and consequences, as well as the policies needed to ensure food security in light of the skyrocketing cost of food. This book was published as a special double issue of Development in Practice.

A practical coverage of the principles of producing seeds for the main agricultural crops, this book emphasises producing optimal quality seed, and applies to small and large scale farms worldwide. Cereals such as wheat, rice, barley, rye and maize are covered along with pulses, legumes, oil seed rape and soybean. The coverage includes principles of production such as pollination, agronomy issues such as site selection and cultivar purity, seed processing, drying and storage. A focus on global food security is maintained throughout. It is suitable for researchers and students in agriculture an.

On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development. At no other point in history has agriculture been faced with such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. And agriculture continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the damage and loss wrought by disasters. Their growing frequency and intensity, along with the systemic nature of risk, are upending people’s lives, devastating livelihoods, and jeopardizing our entire food system. This report makes a powerful case for investing in resilience and disaster risk reduction – especially data gathering and analysis for evidence informed action – to ensure agriculture’s crucial role in achieving the future we want.