The FAO Investment Centre provides a wide range of support services to help countries make more and better investments in food and agriculture. This review looks back at the work the Centre carried out with its partners in 2020. Despite a challenging year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre’s global team supported investment-related policy and sector studies to increase policy dialogue and contributed to the design, technical assistance, supervision or evaluation of investment projects in 120 countries. The Centre increasingly linked both its policy work with investment support to scale up impact. And it promoted greater knowledge sharing and innovation, while also helping to strengthen the capacity of people and institutions to make better investment decisions. The Centre continues to remain relevant by adapting its skills and expertise to keep pace with a constantly evolving investment landscape and fast-changing world and by advocating for more sustainable agri-food systems.

Poised to become the go-to place for agrifood investment and finance solutions, the FAO Investment Centre provides a full suite of investment support services to FAO Members, working in over 120 countries. The Centre acts as a bridge between Members and financing partners to scale up agrifood investment for greater impact at country level. It also supports better enabling conditions for policy and investment and integrates FAO’s vast knowledge and expertise into national and regional investment planning.In 2022, the Centre helped design 45 IFI-approved public investment projects in 34 countries for a total of USD 8.8 billion in new investment – up 22 percent from the previous year’s USD 7.2 billion. And it provided implementation support to 275 ongoing investment projects representing a portfolio worth over USD 44.5 billion.Also notable were contributions to 52 agricultural studies, 25 sector studies, 17 policy studies and 6 policy dialogues and the publication of 34 new knowledge products – from a flagship study on carbon neutrality in agrifood systems to investing in youth in Africa, among others.

FAO’s major publications series are presented together in a user-friendly catalogue. The catalogue features all of the most active series, both new and long-standing, and is divided into areas of work, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, trade and investment, among others. Each series entry includes technical specifications, language versions, most recent titles, relevant ISSNs, and QR codes linking to online resources in the FAO Document Repository.

More than a decade has passed since the publication of the series entitled Social Analysis of Agriculture and Rural Investment Projects, which comprises three complementary manuals – the Manager’s, Practitioner’s and Field guides. During this time, conflict, climate change and economic downturns have been driving up poverty, hunger, and socioeconomic inequalities, reducing the resilience of agrifood systems. In response, the FAO Investment Centre has updated the Social Analysis guides to address the evolving and volatile rural transformation context, providing programme managers, practitioners and field workers with a set of enhanced tools for the design, implementation and evaluation of inclusive investments in agrifood systems. Today’s investments must prioritize more demand-driven, people-centred, culturally sensitive and locally owned sustainable approaches, with increased attention to reducing gender and other inequalities. Operationalizing these principles contributes to FAO’s and financing agencies’ objectives of ending poverty, improving food security and nutrition, and reducing inequalities. The goal of the updated guides is to support investments that contribute to inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, aligned with the outcomes of the UN Food Systems Summit, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the core principle of leaving no one behind. This publication is part of the Investment Toolkits series under the FAO Investment Centre's Knowledge for Investment (K4I) series. The contents of this publication have been turned into three e-leaning courses, which are accessible for free through the FAO E-learning Academy.

This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the 1970s, when CGIAR was established and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was created to recycle petrodollars. Despite numerous international consultations and an increased number of actors, there has been no real growth in international assistance, except for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The book concurrently focuses on the structural transformation of developing countries in Asia and Africa, with some making great strides in small farmer development and in achieving structural transformation of their economies. Some have also achieved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG2, but most have not. Not only are some countries, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lagging behind, but they face new challenges of climate change, competition from emerging countries, population pressure, urbanization, environmental decay, and dietary transition. Lagging developing countries need huge investments in human capital, and physical and institutional infrastructure, to take advantage of rapid change in technologies, but the role of international assistance in financial transfers has diminished. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only set many poorer countries back but starkly revealed the weaknesses of past strategies. Transformative changes are needed in developing countries with international cooperation to achieve better outcomes. Will change in the United States bring new opportunities for multilateral cooperation?"--