Objectives of the manual:
i. To provide farmer trainers/facilitators with relevant knowledge and skills to identify and manage pig diseases, pests/parasites for improved productivity and marketing of pigs and pig products.
ii. To refresh trainers’ and farmers’ knowledge and skills to diagnose and manage important animal diseases, pests/parasites affecting pig productivity.
iii. To provide trainers with knowledge and skills on safe handling and use of veterinary drugs, vaccines and acaricides to ensure food safety and environment conservation.

Food is a vital component of Colombia's economy. The impact of climate change on agriculture and food security in the country is severe. The effects have resulted in decreased production and in the productivity of agricultural soil. Desertification processes are accelerating and intensifying. Colombia's government formally submitted its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) on December 29, 2020. This paper examines Colombia's NDC from the standpoint of the food system.

Intervention Context: WFP’s activities in Burkina Faso and Niger focus on fragile agrarian communities in the Sahel, where cyclical floods and droughts combine with decreasing soil fertility and increasing desertification, among other challenges, to aggravate food and livelihood insecurity. Increased competition for land for food crops and pastures as well as water for domestic, productive, and livestock use, intensify conflicts over ownership and usage rights for land and the commons such as forests. in particular, this competition has heightened conflicts between farmers and herders.

This study assesses the political economy of the conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that brought out in April 2023, resulting in massive violence, displacement, and threats to food security. Based on a series of key informant interviews and other secondary materials, this study identifies that the primary underlying driver of the conflict relates to the rise of competition between the SAF and RSF over productive resources, including within the agri-food system.

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) play a key role in improving agricultural production, enhancing socio-ecological resilience, and mitigating rural poverty. However, the use of ICTs for agricultural development among smallholder farmers, especially in the least developed countries, still lags behind. It is therefore critical to understand distinct attitudes among heterogeneous smallholder farmers that determine use of ICTs, such as mobile phones. Moreover, data-driven empirical studies on the use of mobile phones in smallholder settings are still scarce.

The benefits of subsistence-crop commercialization may depend on gender norms and relations. In sub-Saharan Africa, crop commercialization has been shown to often have unequal outcomes for women and men due to pre-existing social hierarchies and norms around farm roles, asset ownership, control over crops and income, and local farming practices.

The agricultural sector is a key driver of climate change and biodiversity loss and is in urgent
need for transition. NATURE+, a large-scale CGIAR agricultural development initiative, aims
to support small-holder farmers in shifting agrifood systems to more sustainable pathways by
adopting nature-positive solutions. With gender equality at its core, it is crucial to enhance
women’s opportunities and to identify any barriers to the adoption of nature-positive practices.

The Rethinking Food Markets and Value Chains for Inclusion and Sustainability Initiative aims to provide evidence on what types of bundled innovations, incentive structures, and policies are most effective at creating more equitable sharing of income and employment opportunities in growing food markets, while reducing the food sector’s environmental footprint. The Initiative is organized into four working groups (Work Packages-WP).

Maize is the major food crop in eastern and southern Africa, including Kenya. Maize-based farming systems make up the largest proportion of agricultural land, and maize is central to the food system, in both rural and urban areas. Because of its importance, maize has received wide attention from the government, including in policy and research. As a result, Kenya has been at the forefront of the “maize green revolution” in Africa (Hassan and Karanja 1997; Hassan, Njoroge et al. 1998c).

This brief identifies important constructs for assessing drivers of food choice behaviors and describes progress on the development of a repository of instruments and measures for assessing these constructs.
OBJECTIVES

List constructs that can be assessed to understand drivers of household and individual food choice behaviors.
Identify instruments and measures to assess each food choice construct and organize these into a searchable repository.
Illustrate the use of the Food Choice Repository.

Applying the difference-in-difference (DID) estimation procedure, this study quantifies the wheat blast (Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum) induced losses in wheat yield, quantity of wheat sold, consumed, or stored, as well as wheat grain value in Bangladesh in 2016 following a disease outbreak that affected over 15,000 ha. Estimates show that the blast-induced yield loss was 540 kg ha−1 on average for households in blast-affected districts. Estimated total wheat production loss was approximately 8,205 tons worth USD 2.1 million in during the 2016 outbreak.