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Showing items 55 through 63 of 314.
Not only rabbits and guinea-pigs but sheep, goats, cattle and pigs also play a crucial role in the food and income situation of countless city-dwellers world-wide. However, when people and animals live in such close proximity, health risks are inevitable.
If the current trend in global meat demand persists, meat production will need to rise from 300 million tons today to 470 million tons by 2050. Climate and our natural resources would lose out, our author warns.
Nowadays it is hard to imagine European livestock production without soya-based feed. But this trend has had a massive impact on rural areas in the global South – the bulk of the soya fed to livestock in Europe is imported from Argentina and Brazil.
China has a longstanding tradition of using biogas for decentralised energy supply. Already, there are nearly 42 million household digesters in the rural areas, a figure set to double by 2020. But the country has even more ambitious plans.
Converting from subsistence to market-oriented farming can increase income.
José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), on the role of family farms for global food security, the need for sound rural development stategies and the responsibility of governments, the private sector and civil society.
Family farming has many different meanings to many different people. While such farms come in all shape and sizes, one thing all practitioners agree on is that family farming is more than a business – it’s a way of life.
Family farms are especially well suited to meet the challenges of labour organisation in agriculture. In early stages of development, they play a particularly important role in creating productive employment for the major share of the population.
For a long time, the agricultural policies of the Mercosur states ignored family farming, focusing on promoting individual crops and export production instead. Rural development was not on the agenda. Only after the turn of the millennium did a process of rethinking set in.