Empowerment is the “expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices”. According to the UN, women’s empowerment has five components: women’s sense of self-worth; their right to have and to determine choices; their right to have access to opportunities and resources; their right to have the power to control their own lives, both within and outside the home; and their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally.

Agricultural investment at the crossroads in Cambodia: Towards inclusion of smallholder farmers?

Investment in agriculture is widely recognized as crucial for economic growth, poverty reduction and improved food and nutrition security. Although several estimates have been made of how much investment is needed in agriculture to achieve production or food security goals, no source to date has attempted to estimate the total amount of public and private investment that is actually made in agriculture. This paper does so using the most up to date and comprehensive international datasets available.

The crucial event in the reporting period was undoubtedly Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan. On September 27, 2020 Azerbaijan started its war on Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed region called Artsakh in Armenia, which lasted for 44 days. It ended on November 10, 2020, when Russia facilitated a cease-fire, apparently just after the Azerbaijani forces had captured most of the territories occupied by Armenia in the previous war in the early 1990s, plus a major chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh proper.

Gender equality is key to eliminating poverty and hunger, and this has been demonstrated by FAO throughout its research across the world. FAO is committed to interventions that seek to reduce gender inequalities and this report has been produced as part of its eff orts to generate evidence and knowledge in compliance with FAO’s Policy on Gender Equality (FAO, 2013a). It is only through closing the gender gap that strategies on sustainable agriculture and rural development can reach their full potential.

The agricultural sector in Armenia contributes around 20 percent to gross domestic product and provides employment to around 40 percent of the country’s labour force. The backbone of agriculture in the country is represented by smallholders and family farms. According to 2014 census data, 317 346 family farms contribute over 97 percent of the total agricultural output and comprise 99 86 percent of all active agricultural holdings.

Armenia is a country that is very much characterized by agriculture – but Armenian rural life is marked by a deep crisis, as this current study shows.

How do we measure the success of agrarian transformation? Land reform, in- terpreted in the transition context as privatization of land with the associated is- sues of land market development and the restructuring of traditional large farms, is only one facet of a multi-dimensional process of transition to a market-oriented agriculture. However important land reform is, success requires progress in all relevant dimensions.