Action Plan of the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics

The goal of the Global Action Plan is to contribute to greater food security, reduced food price volatility, and higher incomes and greater well-being for rural populations through evidence-based policies in line with the first Millennium Development Goal: “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.” In addition, improved policies will contribute to the sustainable use of land and water resources and the adaptation of agricultural activities to climate change to meet the challenges of MDG 7: “Ensure environmental sustainability.” The Global Action Plan provides the framework needed to rebuild a sustainable national statistical capacity to produce agricultural statistics and increase their use for better policy decisions. It also supports implementation of the methodology required to produce statistics to meet emerging data requirements and help restore the international support system for agricultural statistics. The plan is centred on the three pillars of the Global Strategy: (1) establish a minimum set of core data; (2) integrate agriculture into the national statistical system; and (3) foster sustainability of the statistical system through governance and statistical capacity building. The Action Plan includes a big research Plan, whose goal is to develop and disseminate advanced and cost-effective methodologies, tools, and standards for the use of agricultural statisticians in developing countries. These will be in the form of methodological publications which will be the basis for guidelines, handbooks, and documentation of good practices in priority research topics to foster the production of reliable statistics. The Outcome of the Action Plan is to enable target countries to develop sustainable statistical systems for production and dissemination of accurate and timely agricultural and rural statistics, comparable over time and across countries. In order to achieve this outcome, four global outputs are identified as follow: 1. Effective governing bodies set up and functioning at global and regional levels; 2. Coordinating bodies of the national statistical system, legal frameworks and strategic plans established (by the countries) in the target countries, to enable the integration of agriculture into the national statistical system; 3. New cost effective methods for data collection, analysis and dissemination developed and disseminated; 4. Increased capacity of agricultural statistics staff in regional training centres (i.e. trainers) and target countries.