The evidence base for the effectiveness of gender-transformative approaches (GTAs) in agriculture and food system interventions is small and weak, and many studies do not focus on specifically evaluating these approaches and methods.
While the very limited quantitative evidence suggests that interventions that integrate GTAs have weak or no effects on many outcomes for women’s empowerment outcomes (including gender norms), qualitative evidence shows that, in some instances, shifts in gender roles could eventually lead to change in gender norms.

In India, farmer producer organizations (FPOs) promote collective action among small and marginalized farmers, especially women. By facilitating resource pooling and coordination of production activities, improving market access, and providing training and extension, FPOs can contribute to higher agricultural incomes for smallholder farmers. Women’s FPOs also help formalize women’s roles in agriculture, offer them remunerative employment, and enhance their engagement across the value chain.

Gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in many agri-food systems (AFS), limiting the potential of women—especially those from agriculture-dependent communities—to be empowered and to build social and economic resilience to climate change challenges. The Harnessing Gender and Social Equality for Resilience in Agri-food Systems (HER+) initiative will generate learning and evidence on where and how to intervene at a deeper level to disrupt the foundations of inequality in AFS. This effort requires high-quality data.

There is a push toward natural, chemical-free farming in India, reflected in the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). Working to promote on-farm bio-input preparations and agro-ecological practices, the NMNF notably prioritizes working among “traditionally low or no fertilizer input users… generally confined to hilly, tribal, high forestland districts,” ostensibly viewing these areas as more amenable to chemical-free farming.

Women play an important role in agriculture and account for around 50% of the agricultural labor force in Asia. Strong evidence exists to prove that women farmers have less access to land, inputs, labor and information compared to men, which, in turn, can influence technical efficiency in farms, that is the effectiveness with which a given set of inputs is used to produce output. Strong reasons indicate that women’s empowerment may contribute to enhancing technical efficiency, most notably through improvements in women’s access to human, physical, and social capital.

In the framework of the EU-RBA Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition (JP GTA), FAO, IFAD, WFP and the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform developed “Guidelines for measuring gender transformative change in the context of food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture” aimed at enhancing the capacity of research and development partners to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender transformative interventions.

On July 4, 2023, the launch meeting of the International Forum of Low-emission Agrifood Systems (IFLEAS), jointly initiated by China Agricultural University, the CGIAR Research Initiative on Low-Emission Food Systems (Mitigate+), and the Beijing Representative Office, was held in Beijing. Xin Xian, vice president of China Agricultural University; Qian Keming, research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and former vice minister of commerce; Qin Hu, vice president and chief representative of the Beijing Office of EDF, delivered the opening speeches.

Mainstreaming women in agriculture is the need of the hour and its imperative to bring and discuss innovations and approaches which can accelerate the pace of it. In spite of her back-breaking work women farmers remain invisible and is aspiring for her identity as a farmer. There are various challenges which is in the ecosystem of a woman farmer ranging from lack of an equal level playing field with that of men, identity crisis, lack of gendered extension system, lack of control over resources like land, input etc. which needs a planned strategy and intervention aiming to reduce the gaps.

What happens to local institutional arrangements regarding access and use of communal land under the forces of
agricultural commercialization? Taking Khwaykham village in Phongsaly province, Laos as a case study, this
paper sheds light on this question as farm households in the settlement have progressively transitioned to
commercial farming, specifically tea cultivation. Traditionally, farm households’ access and rights to use the land
were embedded in their swidden agriculture practices. The adoption of tea has increasingly fixed land use rights,

One of the most serious challenges threatening agricultural sustainability in Nigeria is land degradation. Although this issue has received little attention, soil and water conservation practices have been identified as a possible pathway out of the potential problems posed by land degradation. Therefore, the central research question that this paper tries to address is the following: Do adoption of soil and water conservation (SWC) practices affect crop productivity and household welfare?