FAO Guidelines

Editor's note 24Apr13: Source D141 (common text for all land uses).

The Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO) is an intergovernmental organization with 191 Member Nations. Its primary mandate is to ensure global food security, by improving agricultural productivity and raising nutrition levels. Its activities comprise four main areas: (1) knowledge sharing through the collection, analysis and dissemination of data that aid development, (2) Sharing policy expertise: devising agricultural policy, supporting planning, drafting effective legislation and creating national strategies to achieve rural development and hunger alleviation goals, (3) Providing a meeting place for nations, with the intention to be a neutral forum, (4) Bringing knowledge to the field (implementation of field projects).  

The FAO publishes a range of different resources, including technical documents codes of conduct; interactive tools for use at the national level; early warning and disaster-prevention systems; data, including maps and charts and thousands of other multimedia resources. These address a diversity of topics such as agriculture, fisheries, nutrition and forestry, as well as specific issues such as trade, country-specific information, food safety and deforestation. The FAO deals with both specific and cross-cutting issues, including LEDD in all three types of land use: cropland, grazing land and forests/shrubland.

Specifically, the FAO has published a range of voluntary guidelines with relevance to land use and soil. These include, for example:

• The FAO Guidelines for Soil Description (first published in 1990) that provide an internationally common language and complete procedure for soil description and for collecting field data necessary for classification. The recent 4th addition (2006a) also takes into account some new international developments in soil information systems and soil classification;
• Guidelines for Land Use Planning (FAO 1993);
• Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible management of planted forests (FAO 2006b)
• Voluntary Guidelines on the governance of tenure (FAO 2009).
• Methodology for Sustainable Grassland Management (FAO 2011)

The FAO Voluntary Guidelines generally provide practical guidance to states, civil society and the private sector. They constitute a framework for policies, legislation and programs, but do not establish legally binding obligations nor replace existing national or international laws, treaties or agreements. Voluntary Guidelines are often supported by Technical Guides in order to facilitate implementation.

These guidelines can potentially have important practical role. Methodology for Sustainable Grassland Management (Li et al 2011), for example, could prove to be a very important tool in supporting the restoration of degraded grasslands by enabling the inclusion of grassland restoration in carbon crediting schemes. The methodology sets out a process for reliable estimates of the sequestration effect of improved grassland management.

In September 2011, the FAO launched the Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. This initiative has the potential to contribute to knowledge exchange, capacity building and improved governance for sustainable and productive soil management affecting cropland, grazing land, and forests/shrubland.

Despite the absence of an enforcement function, the FAO mandate and activities meant that it plays a central role in facilitating sustainable land management and is a key stakeholder in addressing LEDD processes internationally as well as at country level.

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