João Soares, Michael Williams, Ian Jarvis, Wu Bingfang, Olivier Leo et al..........
This is a proposal to “The G20 Global Agricultural Monitoring” initiative, held in May 2011.
The G20 initiative to strengthen agricultural monitoring at national and global scales in order to increase the transparency of food markets will build upon advances already achieved by the Group on Earth Observations, particularly through its Task on the Global Agricultural Monitoring System.
The initiative will be implemented through three main actions:
- Action 1. Strengthening national capacities for agricultural monitoring including capacity building, sharing of experience, research development, institutional strengthening and facilitated access to Earth observation data.
- Action 2. Harmonizing, connecting and strengthening of existing regional and global agricultural monitoring systems and boosting confidence in their results by intercomparing and disseminating their information.
- Action 3. Developing an operational global agricultural monitoring system of systems, based on sustained and coordinated satellite and in-situ systems for Earth Observation and weather forecasting with a free and open access data policy and a commitment to continuity.
Action 1 and 2 are fully complementary. Strengthening national capacity to monitor agriculture (Action 1) will allow the community to improve the quality of monitoring and forecasting and raise the awareness and involvement of stakeholders as well as their use of
information. Establishing harmonized regional and global agricultural monitoring systems (Action 2), will allow the international community to make the overall system more homogeneous, robust and responsive, resulting in more reliable and defensible information for
policy makers.