ROME, 7 September 2016 (FAO): The United States Agency for International Development (USAID = Amerikas Danida)) and FAO have signed a 15 million US dollar (ca. 100 mio. DKR) agreement aimed at boosting the capacity of developing countries to track key agricultural data.
This information is essential to good policymaking and will help track progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs = dagsorden 2030).
The second of the SDG goals is to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
"In the decades to come, humanity will need to produce more food for a growing population using natural resources such as water, land and biodiversity in a sustainable way – while coping with the challenges imposed by climate change," said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.
"Our ability to boost food yields sustainably and meet the SDG hunger eradication target will hinge on the availability of better, cost-effective and timely statistical data for agriculture and rural areas", he added.
“Strong national data systems are critical for governments and private sector actors to make informed and smart decisions that foster food security and economic prosperity”, said Beth Dunford from USAID.
“Our work with FAO under the Feed the Future initiative builds on years of success and lessons learned, and is essential to bring about the types of data systems to support the more catalytic investments needed to achieve a food-secure world by 2030”, added Dunford, who is assistant to the Administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Food Security and Deputy Coordinator for Development for the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative.
Broader approach to data collection, new tools
The USAID donation will cover the first phase of an FAO-led project that will run from 2016 to 2021 starting with pilot efforts in four developing countries, two in Sub-Saharan Africa, one in Latin America and one in Asia. A dialogue is under way with eligible countries.
The goal: To design and implement a new and cost-effective approach to agricultural data collection in developing world contexts, known as agricultural integrated surveys (AGRIS).
The AGRIS methodology will not only capture improved annual data on agricultural production, but also broader and more detailed structural information relating to farms, including employment, machinery use, production costs, farming practices, and environmental impacts.
It will incorporate recent innovations like remote sensing, GPS, mobile technology and various uses of "big data." These tools will introduce more objective approaches to measuring agricultural performance, in some cases replacing traditional, more expensive methods.
In addition to better and more detailed data, AGRIS will also promote the integration of disparate data sources, improve data timeliness and usability, and cut data collection costs.
The end result will be high-quality data on a wide range of technical, economic, environmental and social dimensions of agriculture that will help governments analyse and understand the impacts of agricultural policies, assess progress toward the SDGs and other goals, and shape better policies.
A new era in agricultural data collection
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