Blog for People, Food and Nature

In recent decades, Peru has experimented with policy reforms to promote more sustainable forest management. At the same time, donors and NGOs have introduced community forestry initiatives that have tried to encourage rural people to participate legally in the forestry sector. However, it’s not clear whether these…

Kedar Mankad, EcoAgriculture Partners It seems that a week doesn’t pass these days without a new editorial on palm oil. Sometimes they highlight the bad, other times they highlight the good. When speaking of solutions, the dialogue on both sides inexorably leads toward “win-win” solutions, where consumers, …

By Claudia Gray, Post-doctoral research fellow in ecology and conservation, University of Sussex, UK Every time you go to the supermarket, you are likely to buy something containing palm oil. In the UK and the US, 10 - 50% of all items in an average shopping basket contain it. Palm oil is the world’s most widely u…

By Pernilla Malmer, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Million Belay, MELCA-Ethiopia Food production is at the centre of Earth’s biological and cultural – or “biocultural” - diversity. The Telecho community in Ethiopia is just one out of millions of communities worldwide where cultivated crops and animal bree…

Semi-natural grasslands are often habitats dominated by a high diversity of indigenous plant species, which are characterized by their small size and tolerance for disturbance. The long-term history of the emergence of these plants is not fully known, but it is well known that they cannot survive without moderate dis…

The 25th World Cocoa Foundation Partnership Meeting, and the 6th Indonesian International Cocoa Conference wrap up today in Bali, Indonesia. These meetings marked an important moment for the cocoa industry. Unlike other major commodity sectors, market demand for sustainably sourced cocoa isn't in question. Mars, Ferrer…