The outcome of the Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security can be considered a victory for those who want to see the multilateral governance of the global food and agriculture system improved and strengthened, and conducted within the Right to Adequate Food framework.

Establishing a rational forest policy is a difficult task for many countries. One of the reasons for this is that different policy sectors - such as energy policy, foreign trade policy, are closely linked to forest policy and the interests of a multitude of actors need to be accommodated.

The Congo Basin Forest Partnership aims to reconcile forest conservation with forest use. This article explains what a “policy network” of this sort can achieve and where its limits lie.

In rural areas of many developing countries fuelwood constitutes the only energy source – often with negative impacts on humans and the environment. Wise management and modern technology can guarantee a sustainable use of this valuable resource, as some examples from Latin America demonstrate.

Every year, 13 million hectares of forest are lost worldwide; that is an area the size of Austria and Switzerland combined. 90 percent of this deforestation involves tropical forests.