Open Web Research Resource: FAO Unveils New Public Tool Based on Agricultural Census Data

From the FAO:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is endowing FAOSTAT, the world’s largest agricultural data base, with an important new domain that enables much easier comparison and assessment of trends over time of the agricultural structures of all Member countries.

An open access portal serving as a global public good, FAOSTAT gathers and harmonizes a wealth of data on the production, trade and consumption in the agricultural sectors, by far the world’s largest economic sector in terms of employment and sustaining livelihoods. In recent years FAO has added an increasing array of critical information on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, forest cover and investment. Now it is adding “Structural Data from Agricultural Censuses,” which present fine-grained national reports that track, among others, how large farm holdings are, who works on them, and who owns them.

“This data is not available anywhere in the world,” says Jairo Castano, Senior Statistician and Leader of the FAO’s World Programme for the Census of Agriculture, and who steered the project to fruition. “This is precious bottom-up information based on actual farms, all the world’s farms.”

The new domain allows rapid access to knowing how many farms exist in a given country, what their sizes are, the tenure typology determining its ownership, the farmer’s gender, and how many people live and work on them, all sourced to national Agricultural Censuses.

“This allows policy workers to compare the structure of the agricultural sector of one country with that of another or of a region, while also allowing researchers to analyze, for example, the distribution of farm sizes both at the national and global level,” Castano said.

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