Food systems provide a wider lens, addressing the connections between food, health, employment, incomes, environment and the well-being of human communities.

Led by the Government of Andhra Pradesh, CIRAD and FAO, AgroEco2050 is a collective future-building exercise engaging scientists, farmers, policymakers and institutions.
It unveils hidden realities, processes, actors and parameters to explore broader visions for sustainable food systems by 2050.
It builds on a huge diversity of data and knowledge to help democratic societies shape the futures they desire, rather than predicting or prescribing it.

AgroEco2050 aimed to clarify and quantify two different visions of what agriculture, food, nature, jobs and welfare in Andhra Pradesh might look like in 2050. One vision was based on the intensification of conventional industrial farming, while the other was based on taking natural farming (agroecology) to scale. The goal was to compare and understand the implications of these two different pathways and verify their coherence.

The State of India’s Environment 2022 is the 9th annual edition in this series, and is the country’s most authoritative statement on the developments in the environment and related sectors.

Backed by four decades of research and publishing history, this annual publication of the Centre for Science and Environment, and Down To Earth, focuses on climate change, migration, health and food systems. It also covers biodiversity, forest and wildlife, energy, industry, habitat, pollution, waste, agriculture and rural development.

This 9th annual edition also offers a special assessment of the state of development in the States through graphical analysis and data. With contributors ranging from academics, researchers, journalists and policymakers, the report is a must-have for anyone interested in getting the complete picture of all things environmental.

The complexities of smallholder farming systems pose a challenge in demonstrating the potential benefits or risks of new technologies and policies. Using Integrated Analysis Tool, a rule-based dynamic simulation model, this study tried to improve the performance of major farming systems in the Tamil Nadu State of India. Amongst the four major farming systems viz. Black gram-based (BFS), Paddy-based (PFS), and Integrated Farming Systems (IFS) in Villupuram district and Dryland Farming System (DFS) in Virudhunagar district, IFS was found to be the most profitable and resilient based on their performance simulated for a 3-year rotation. Setting IFS as a benchmark, potential interventions were evaluated under other farming systems to improve their relative performance. The analysis allowed understanding the interactions in smallholder farming systems and the potential impact of interventions in a whole farm way considering the cash flows, cost intensity, and input-output trade-offs. While multi-bloom technology in black gram increased the net profit of BFS without much stress on input and labour, area expansion under rainfed groundnut incurred high expenditure. Trading-off paddy with maize and groundnut significantly increased the net profit of PFS but replacing sugarcane with tapioca and turmeric was not remunerative. Improved livestock management practices have substantially increased the net profit of DFS wherein crop yield could not be enhanced substantially without the prospects of good irrigation infrastructure. The irrigation endowed PFS has achieved 90% performance, whereas the water-starved BFS and DFS could achieve only 65% performance of IFS. We conclude that agricultural policy must not only focus on potential interventions that are profitable but also consider what is acceptable to the farmer, considering synergies and trade-offs between competing resources at the farm level.

The farmer field school (FFS) approach, based on group experimentation of innovative practices and/or farming systems, is in line with participatory farm advisory efforts. This approach has an ambitious goal: strengthening farmers’ skills so that they can adapt their practices, or even invent new ones, and move towards more agroecological farming systems. Assessing such an advisory intervention poses significant challenges. The purpose of this document is to propose fresh ways to update FFS assessment methods, notably the study of changes in farming practices and the detailed analysis of FFS outcomes. Project designers, managers, and evaluators are the target audience for this document, which may also interest teachers, researchers, students, and policymakers. The elements of the FFS assessment methodology presented here stem from the collaboration between three institutions, CIRAD, FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), and the NGO AVSF (Agronomists and Veterinarians Without Borders), and fieldwork carried out in cotton-growing areas of Burkina Faso and Togo between 2018 and 2019.

This document is divided into four parts. We first define FSS and the principles of the approach, then we detail the methods commonly used to assess FSS and the challenges involved. We then present a comprehensive assessment method using a case study in northern Togo. The final part of the report provides a basis for placing the proposed method within the process of designing an assessment for a project involving FSS.

Agroecology applies ecological principles to agriculture and ensures a regenerative use of natural resources and ecosystem services, while addressing the need for socially equitable food systems in which people can choose what they eat and how it is produced.

project focuses on climate-smart landscape restoration and the promotion of livelihood strategies that foster resilience. The landscape graduation model combines a biophysical, socio-economic, and institutional assessment of landscape and community status with an intervention strategy to help communities and landscapes graduate from highly degraded and impoverished to more sustainable levels.

informed IFAD’s ROLL project in Lesotho. It provided a baseline for analysing and comparing the performance of different types of agricultural systems across multiple dimensions of sustainability.

The key to implementing farmer field schools (FFS) is to trigger an experimentation process based on collaboration between a group of farmers and a facilitator. The purpose of this document is to provide project managers, technicians and designers with practical information on how to use the FFS approach and adapt it to their context of intervention to support the agroecological transition (AET). It also will be useful for research staff, leaders of farmers’ organizations (FOs), teachers and students interested in using the FFS approach or better understand its benefits.

The findings and recommendations proposed in this document are the result of a partnership between three institutions working to support AET in the Global South: CIRAD, FAO and the NGO AVSF (Agronomists and Veterinarians Without Borders).

Why should extension and advisory services promote agroecology?
The global impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever clearer, and natural resources and ecosystems are being depleted. Despite some progress, hunger and poverty persist, and inequalities are deepening. The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world. There is global consensus on the urgent need for a transition to agri-food systems that ensure food and nutrition security, social and economic equity, and sustain the ecosystem on which all these elements depend. Agroecology provides a crucial pathway towards this objective. Making extension and advisory services (EAS) demand-driven is not an end in itself but a means to improving their relevance and impact.

This report shares an analysis of the effects of natural and man-made shocks in the agri-food system of Bangladesh. It analyses the results of a field assessment conducted in April and May 2021. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is implementing a project to contribute to data collection and analysis linked to shocks affecting agricultural livelihoods and food security, in order to inform evidence-based programming in selected countries. The objective is to assess the effects of these shocks on the agri-food system, which includes crops, livestock and fishing, food supply, livelihoods and food security of rural populations. Information is collected from primary sources of the production process: producer households, traders or marketers, inputs suppliers, extension officers and other key informants.