Agriculture Monitoring

Today, Africa faces major pressing issues: climate change impact, water scarcity, energy shortage, environmental stresses and food crisis, which affect citizens, business and the community at large. Efforts were made by African countries to work out strategies and policies coordinated in the fields of the environment and the sustainable development.  A particular importance is attached to food security, management of resource water, combat against endemics diseases, ecosystems conservation and biodiversity, sustainable energy development, etc.

On all these challenges, constitution of coherent seamless and up-to-date spatially enabled information is an essential precondition for setting up coordinated policy and strategy. Geoinformation is useful in constituting factual, precise and updated information for better decision-making. The technology is now commonly used to assess conditions of people and ecosystems wellbeing (resource availability and conditions, their changes, trends and interactions) and move toward sustainability and economic growth.

A concrete application is related to food security crisis. Geoinformation technology can make it possible to respond within very short times with timely information for predicting and simulating the production expected during one agricultural season. Business questions the Geoinformation Systems Section at ECA could help to address are: Where are the main production zones? How much is produced? Where are infrastructures for planning flows and provisioning fluxes (e.g., water, irrigation, electricity and roads, agro-industries, storage facilities, market places)? Where are suitable areas for crop production? What are the driving factors (variation of ecological conditions and their impact on crops production; disconnect between market places and crops main production zones)?

Agricultural Commodity Value-Chain Database and Interface. The Heads of State and Government of the African Union assembled in Abuja, Nigeria in December 2006, recalling the decision to adopt the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) at the Maputo Summit in July 2003 as a framework for accelerating agriculture development and Food Security on the continent, declared their commitment to increase Intra-African trade by promoting and protecting rice, maize, legumes, cotton, oil palm, beef, dairy, poultry and fisheries products as strategic commodities at the continental level, and cassava, sorghum and millet at sub-regional level and to develop continental and regional market information systems and support the development of the same at national level by 2008. As a result, the Geo-information Systems Section of ICT, Science and Technology Division and the Agricultural Marketing & Support Section of the Food Security and Sustainable Development Division are developing a spatially enabled database system to support the analyses of the regional trends of agriculture production and marketing in Africa. The System will enable decision makers to analyze and model the relationships between suitable agro-ecological zones for the priority crops identified in CAADP, the actual production of the crops and their marketing and distribution patterns. An inventory of available data and information resources was conducted with extensive survey through international and regional partners (FAO, World Food Program, IFAD, IFPRI, ECA African Centre of Statistics and United States Department of Agriculture). Data collected so far was processed, analyzed and validated. All spatial datasets and other auxiliary data are integrated, stored and managed in a standard geodatabase. A proposal was initiated to acquire and process high-resolution data. We therefore wish to request members States to assist in getting agriculture statistic data from their respective countries.