Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics

Policy makers and development
practitioners who are responsible for developing investment
strategies to promote economic growth find many challenges
in the changing face of agriculture in the twenty-first
century. In addition to its productive role of providing
food, clothing, fuel, and housing for a growing world
population, agriculture assumes other roles, the importance
of which has more recently been recognized. In addition to
its essential role in food security, agricultural
development is now seen as a vital and high-impact source of
poverty reduction. It is also seen as a source of
environmental problems and a contributor to global warming,
water scarcity and pollution, and land degradation. At the
same time its potential as a source of environmental
services needs to be defined, monitored, and evaluated. Many
of the issues facing the sector transcend national
boundaries. The Global Strategy is the result of an
extensive consultation process with national and
international statistical organizations as well as with
agriculture ministries and other governmental institutions
represented in Food and Agricultural Organization of the
United Nations (FAO) governing bodies. Considerable input
came from the United Nations statistical commission friends
of chair working group and the 2009 meetings of the
International Statistical Institute in Maputo and Durban.
Other collaboration involved the FAO Biannual conference and
discussions at the regional commissions on agricultural
statistics attended by national directors of agricultural
statistics, the World Bank peer review process, and the
development of a Wikipedia web page to collect inputs from
the statistical community. The purpose of the global
strategy is to provide a framework for national and
international statistical systems that enables them to
produce and to apply the basic data and information needed
to guide decision making in the twenty-first century. This
paper presents the overall strategy. It provides a
ground-breaking effort to improve agricultural statistics
that has implications for other sectors in the national
statistical system. While it took many years for agriculture
statistics to deteriorate to their current state, the
implementation of the strategy provides a fresh start.