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Showing items 64 through 72 of 509.
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.
Despite the crucial role of women in family farms and small-scale agriculture, gender inequality is still present in many ways – jeopardising the food and nutrition security of millions of people.
A focus edition on family farming would hardly be credible without giving the family farmers themselves an opportunity to speak. We talked to Moses Munyi, the owner of a six-hectare farm in Embu, Kenya, about his everyday life and about his views of the prospects for farming in the future.
One of the basic conditions of empowering farmers is to get them organised. Machinery rings are a promising organisational concept to link up the farms and raise their profitability and power by promoting mechanisation in rural areas.