Humanity is facing its greatest challenge. To produce 70% more food by 2050 without destroying the environment means doing much more with less. Partly due to the abundant food and record-low food prices achieved by the Green Revolution, overseas development assistance for agriculture dropped...

In a little over a decade, the global population is expected to reach 8 billion. The task of feeding this growing population will become harder with rising natural resource constraints, declining or stagnant crop productivity, more frequent extreme weather events, and climate change. These...

The production of food from marine and freshwaters is undergoing a profound revolution—from hunting to farming or from fishing to aquaculture. Fishing and aquaculture exploit and alter the biodiversity on which they are based, each in different but convergent ways. Fishing harvests a much...

Australia's isolation from other continents over millions of years led to the evolution of many species that exist nowhere else, so called ‘endemic’ species. Of the ten megadiverse countries in the world, we are the only one that is labelled as ‘developed’ so have a global leadership...

As much as seventy times more water is needed to grow food than for domestic use. Severely waterscarce countries such as Egypt do not have enough water to grow their own food and need to import food from elsewhere. Countries like the USA, Australia, China, India, Mexico and Turkey have made...

Biodiversity is the basis for agriculture and for a sustainable future. More than 1.9 million living species have been described; millions more have gone extinct, including major branches of the tree of life. The distribution of this biological diversity is variable in space and time, although it...

Aquaculture is one of the most rapidly developing sectors of global food production, contributing significantly to socio-economic development by providing food security and export earnings from high-value products. The importance of the industry to the expanding world population is underscored...

More people in the world to feed, rising wealth and a new focus on healthy foods are generating a rising tide of demand for fish. This rise in demand is happening just when the main sources of fish and other aquatic life are struggling to keep pace, and prices of many aquatic commodities are...

The world has observed an unprecedented rise in production, consumption and trade of fish during last three decades. Developing countries as a whole supply nearly 75% of the fish, and represent 50% of the value of global fish trade. At a time when receipts from traditional agricultural exports...

There is a new and increasing emphasis on poverty alleviation and livelihoods improvement in forestry, representing both a challenge and an opportunity. This paper briefly reviews the evolution of the ‘livelihoods’ issue, analyses the concept of ‘poverty alleviation’ and discusses means...