The Africa Union Commission (AUC) drafted an African Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan (AFSH) and a Soil Initiative for Africa (SIA) for launching at the Africa Fertilizer summit in June 2023. The AFSH is a ten-year (2023-2033) plan to provide guidance on integrated soil fertility maintenance, including the correct use of fertilizer to ensure soil health in Africa. The SIA is a practical initiative to develop an African system for soil management and to implement actions at the continental, sub-regional, and country levels.

There is ample data and literature that shows how women’s experiences in low-paid, short-term migration vary from those of men, and that experiences are linked to women’s empowerment – captured by the interrelated dimensions of resources, agency, and achievements. While considerable attention is paid to understanding the generalized notion of women’s empowerment, it is also key to distinguish empowerment in specific realms, including economic empowerment, agriculture, health and nutrition, and migration.

The global food system is responsible for 23 – 42% of total net anthropogenic emissions. The food systems of all countries need to be transformed to lower their emissions while producing sufficient, nutritious and healthy food. The Low-Emissions Food Systems (Mitigate+) Initiative aims to offer a comprehensive, evidence-based and holistic approach to reducing agrifood systems emissions. It explores possible pathways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while enhancing food security and nutrition and livelihoods and preserving the environment.

The water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus is a cross-sectoral concept offering a holistic perspective of the interconnections among agriculture, energy production, water resources, and ecosystem health. However, most emerging nexus approaches have been narrowly focused on resource efficiency and technocratic ‘fixes’ that don’t adequately consider the impacts of resource use and development on diverse groups of resource users and managers.

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first objective is to measure the technical efficiency of mixed crop-livestock (CL) smallholder producers operating under conservation agriculture systems in Tunisian rainfed areas. The second objective is to explore complementarities, synergies, and economies of diversification across the different production system components of these crop-livestock producers using the cross-partial derivative framework of output variables in the distance function.

The Thar Desert, Sindh, Pakistan is characterized by low productivity. Besides, economy is based on agriculture, livestock and mining, nevertheless, livestock graze freely on public and private land. The aim of this research was to determine biomass production and to evaluate the effects of continuous and seasonal grazing on protected and unprotected plots. A 45 ha protected rangeland area of Hurrabad in the Umerkot Thar desert was selected and divided into three blocks of 15 ha each. Blocks of the same size were also established in unprotected area.

The stakeholder identification is initiated under the CGIAR Research Initiative on Sustainable Healthy Diets through Food Systems Transformation (SHiFT) to identify with whom the project needs to engage with in order to achieve food system transformations. It brings together all the stakeholders working on food systems issues in a so-called ‘living’ database that can be used to quickly identify potential stakeholders in each of the SHIFT target countries.

Scientific evidence is crucial for the transition towards sustainable and resilient agri-food systems. However, sustainability transitions research has been so far north-biased and overlooked the Global South. This paper analyses the scholarly literature on sustainability transitions in West African agriculture and food systems. In particular, it investigates the bibliometrics and geographical coverage of the research field and explores whether and how it addresses topics such as transition frameworks, niches, food security and sustainability.

Farmers commonly split large, undulating crop fields, even those at similar elevation range or contour, into a patchwork of small sub-plots in plane areas of Nepal. Specifically, to ensure irrigation or rainwater throughout their cultivated rice or wheat growing areas, structures like bunds, dikes, and ditches are commonly built. These structures not only require significant labor hours to build but also incur loss of some portion of productive crop areas.

This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises.