The Global Action For Fall Armyworm Control A Resource Mobilization Guide

Fall Armyworm (FAW, Spodoptera frugiperda) is a pest originating in the Americas: it can fly over 100 km per day; it feeds on over 80 hosts; and a female moth can deposit 1 000 eggs during its life. Challenges in mitigating FAW damage include, among others, lack of the following: coordination at global, regional and national levels; effective monitoring and control techniques; and effective phytosanitary measures and capacity at national level. The Global Action for Fall Armyworm Control (GA, 2020-2022) was launched by FAO Director-General QU Dongyu on 4 December 2019 with a mandate for a strong and coordinated approach to strengthen prevention and sustainable pest control capacities. The GA focuses on Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Near East, where an integrated pest management (IPM) strategy will be implemented in countries with significant pest presence, and a prevention strategy will be conducted in areas with limited or no distribution of the pest. The GA has continued to support countries in managing FAW throughout the COVID-19 pandemic by conducting webinars and virtual trainings on FAW monitoring and management and by implementing activities where possible. The Resource Mobilization Guide is intended as a roadmap for use by key stakeholders at regional and national levels to help them identify and engage with a diverse range of existing and potential resource mobilization partners on the critical importance of FAW control for a wide range of sustainable development outcomes.

Fall armyworm (FAW), or Spodoptera frugiperda, is a plant pest originating in the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. Over the last few years, FAW has rapidly spread around Africa, Asia and and, most recently, Oceania. Concerted action is essential to prevent this pest from threatening the food security and livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers. FAO’s new initiative, the Global Action for Fall Armyworm Control, aims to mobilize USD 500 million over three years, from 2020 to 2022, for radical, direct and coordinated measures to strengthen monitoring and pest control capacities at global level. FAO developed its Global Action to improve food security and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers, and reduce environmental pollution through sustainable management and control of FAW. To achieve this, the Global Action will ensure a strong, coordinated approach at country, regional and global levels to massively scale up current worldwide efforts against FAW through multiple mechanisms, such as Farmer Field Schools, partnerships with research institutions and the private sector, South–South Cooperation, regional and national plant protection organizations, and specific national FAW task forces. The Global Action has three key objectives: 1. enhance global, regional, national and farmer-level coordination and collaboration on FAW control, leading to implementation of ecosystem-friendly Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices and policies; 2. reduce crop yield losses caused by FAW; and 3. reduce the risk of further spread of FAW to new areas.

The UN Decade of Family Farming (2019-2028) acknowledges the importance of inclusive rural communication services (RCS) to advance economic, environmental and social dimensions of family farming. Focusing on Africa, this study examines the role of RCS in rural transformation and family farming and provides insights for the region. Through case studies and a review of media and ICT trends and policies, it highlights the need for participatory, farmer-centred communication approaches and responsive delivery mechanisms aligned with local socioeconomic realities. The study concludes with recommendations for embedding RCS into national policies, thereby opening new development opportunities for family farmers and rural communities in the Africa region.

The Flexible Multi-Partner Mechanism (FMM), as FAO’s main pooled multi-partner flexible funding instrument, enables resource partners to contribute voluntary and less-earmarked financial resources to support the delivery of programmatic results under FAO’s Strategic Framework. This report highlights the key achievements of the FMM in 2020, both in terms of its accomplishments as a funding mechanism and the delivery of transformative results on the ground through FMM-funded Programmes and Subprogrammes.

Chemical production, use and disposal will continue to increase worldwide; assessments and forecasts predict that global chemical sales will grow by about 3 percent per year until 2050, the major part of which will take place in Asia. South-East Asian countries in particular have shown strong industrial growth in agriculture during the last two decades. Many countries in Southeast Asia lack the capacity to handle chemicals management issues and are in great need to develop institutions, legislation, knowledge and general awareness. The countries face many challenges in the area of chemicals management, in particular pesticide governance. The intensive and often insufficiently controlled use of pesticides in the large agriculture sector is a major part of the issue. The programme “Towards a Non-Toxic Environment in South-East Asia” was designed and funded by Sida and coordinated by KemI. It was implemented in association with the FAO RAP; PAN-AP and TFA, which aimed to reduce health and environmental risks by monitoring, regulating and managing agricultural, industrial and consumer chemicals around the . This evaluation assessed the role and contributions of FAO against the programme outcome-level results: (i) strengthened regulatory framework for the control and registration of pesticides; and (ii) adoption and economic benefits of the community-level Farmer Field School (FFS) activities in all partner countries within Phase II. In addition, the evaluation assessed FAO’s work on gender mainstreaming, communication and follow-up actions taken in response to the 2016 mid-term evaluation.

Insect pests are becoming a problem of ever-more biblical proportions. This new textbook collates a series of selected papers that attempt to address various fundamental components of area-wide insect pest control. Of special interest are the numerous papers on pilot and operational programs that pay special attention to practical problems encountered during program implementation. It’s a compilation of more than 60 papers authored by experts from more than 30 countries.

Are you a grant maker, manager or evaluator who must assess your work to improve as well as be accountable for the use of resources and results? Does the project, program or organization you fund, manage or evaluate contend with substantial uncertainty about what to do and what will be the results? Do you thus experience constant change and unexpected and unforeseeable actors and factors in your intervention? Do you need to know what you are achieving and how in real time? And therefore, do you seek an alternative to conventional monitoring and evaluation of social change results? If yes, then you are the audience for this book. Beginning in 2002, working closely with co-evaluators and commissioners of evaluations, the author developed Outcome Harvesting to enable evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of changes that interventions have influenced in a broad range of cutting–edge innovation and development projects and programs around the world. Over these years, he led Outcome Harvesting evaluative exercises involving almost 500 non-governmental organizations, networks, government agencies, funding agencies, community-based organizations, research institutes and university programs. In over fifty evaluations, with forty co-evaluators he has harvested thousands of outcomes on six continents. Outcome Harvesting has proven useful in evaluations of a great diversity of initiatives: human rights advocacy, political, economic and environmental advocacy, arts and culture, health systems, information and communication technology, conflict and peace, water and sanitation, taxonomy for development, violence against women, rural development, organic agriculture, participatory democracy, waste management, public sector reform, good governance, eLearning, social accountability, and business competition, amongst others. In this book, the author explains the steps of Outcome Harvesting and how to customize them according to the nine underlying principles. He shares his experience and gives practical advice on how to work with Outcome Harvesting and remain true to its essential features.

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.