3Producing enough food to meet the needs of a growing population has always been the greatest 4 concern of food policy-makers around the world. Given the increasing attention to organic 5 farming (OF), we conducted this study to investigate the main opportunities and challenges of 6 the food production system of small-scale farmers in developing countries with an emphasis on 7 their livelihoods. The study showed that the most significant advantages of OF are 8 environmental protection and a higher resilience to environmental changes, increasing farmers' 9 income and reducing external input cost, enhancing social capacity and increasing employment 10 opportunities. A s well as enhancing food security primarily by increasing the food purchasing 11 power of local people. However, the main challenges of this food production system include 12 lower yields in comparison to conventional systems, difficulties with soil nutrient management, 13 certification and market barriers, and the educational and research needs of small-holders. The 14 paper concludes that even though OF might present some significant challenges to small-scale 15 farmers, it could/should still be considered as a part of the solution and means of improving 16 their livelihoods.

Although some important features of genetically modified (GM) crops such as insect-resistance, herbicide-tolerance and drought-tolerance might seem beneficial to small-scale farmers, the adoption of GM technology by smallholders is still slight. Identifying pros and cons of using this technology is important to understand the impacts of GM crops on these farmers. This article reviews the main opportunities and challenges of GM crops for small-scale farmers in developing countries. The most significant advantages of GM crops include being independent to farm size, environment protection, improvement of occupational health issues, and the potential of bio-fortified crops to reduce malnutrition. Challenges faced by small-scale farmers for adoption of GM crops comprise availability and accessibility of GM crops seeds, seeds dissemination and price, and lack of adequate information. In addition, R&D and production costs in using GM crops make it difficult for these farmers to adopt these crops. Moreover, intellectual property rights regulations may deprive resource poor farmers from the advantages of GM technology. Finally, concerns on socio-economic and environment safety issues are also addressed in this paper.

Achieving food security is one of the most important sustainable development goals and is a major global concern, specifically in remote and rural areas of the developing world where high biodiversity can be found and many protected areas are located. The goals of food security and biodiversity conservation are two of the most critical challenges of our time. This study aims to better understand the state of research on protected areas and food security through a methodological lens. The literature search was conducted in the Web of Science core collection and the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CAB) abstracts database. The search results indicate that this is an understudied topic with only nineteen articles published in various research domains. The findings reveal that studies were explanatory research rather than confirmatory and most studies had a snapshot design with no control or baseline. National parks were the main category of protected areas reported in studies. Data collection commonly employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods at a household level. We also found that spatial data and methods are important yet underutilized.

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