Crop Monitoring for Improved Food Security
This FAO and ADB report summarizes the outcomes of the Expert Meeting on Crop Monitoring for Improved Food Security in February 2014 at Vientiane, Lao PDR. This expert meeting, gathered over fifty experts and focused on best practices and methodological issues related to crop monitoring and food security. Estimates and forecasts of crop area and yield are of critical importance to policy makers for the planning of agricultural production and monitoring of food supply. The possible links between poverty and crop yields, which depend upon a variety of factors such as cultivation practices, availability of irrigation, access to resources to buy agricultural inputs for adoption of new technology, cannot be fully understood without reliable estimates of crop area and yields. In the absence of reliable information on crop productivity the reasons behind food insecurity of agricultural households cannot be precisely identified. The report contains a series of technical papers presented in the meeting and some reference papers, and also tries to identify challenges for future research work.