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Finding business solutions to tackle hunger and undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa continues to sit at the top of the global political agenda. We have seen firsthand the power that providing enterprise skills and market access can have in empowering smallholder farmers to boost their production, improve their nutrition and increase their incomes – when managed effectively and coupled with…

At the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012 world leaders recognized land degradation, desertification and drought as serious global challenges, impeding sustainable development of all countries and committed to “strive to achieve a land-degradation neutral world” by restoring land and avoiding further land degradation. They also reaffirmed their resolve under the…

Governments have decided collectively that the world needs to limit the average global temperature increase to no more than 2 °C and international negotiations are engaged to that end. Yet any resulting agreement will not emerge before 2015 and new legal obligations will not begin before 2020. Meanwhile, despite many countries taking new actions, the world is drifting further and further from the…

Enhancing food security while contributing to mitigate climate change and preserving the natural resource base and vital ecosystem services requires the transition to agricultural production systems that are more productive, use inputs more efficiently, have less variability and greater stability in their outputs, and are more resilient to risks, shocks and long-term climate variability. More…

There are 1.4 billion poor people living on less than US$1.25 a day. One billion of them live in rural areas where agriculture is their main source of livelihood. The ‘green revolution’ in agriculture that swept large parts of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s dramatically increased agricultural productivity and reduced poverty. In the past 50 years, however, new practices have…

The 2013 Human Development Report is the latest in the series of global Human Development Reports published by UNDP since 1990 as independent, empirically grounded analyses of major development issues, trends and policies. Additional resources related to the 2013 Human Development Report can be found online at http://hdr.undp.org, including complete editions or summaries of the Report in…