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The FAO contribution to monitoring SDGs for food and agriculture

Nature Plants volume 5, pages 1196–1197 (2019)Cite this article

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To the Editor — A recent Editorial in Nature Plants1 highlighted the key role that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) plays in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The FAO is the designated United Nations custodian agency for 21 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators and the contributing agency for another five — covering over 10% of the entire SDG global indicator framework in total. We recognize that this expanded role implies a considerably higher commitment of the organization in the definition of new methods and tools for collecting and disseminating food and agriculture statistics, but also a larger involvement in supporting countries’ efforts in monitoring SDG targets. An extensive modernization of the national data systems and the establishment of new coordination mechanisms among national producers of food and agriculture data are required to meet the new, significant challenges introduced by the 2030 Agenda. We would add that the need for such modernization and coordination is even further emphasized by the growing agriculture and land use data requirements of the Paris climate agreement2.

Nevertheless, we would like to stress that the path towards data improvement at the FAO and in its member countries starts from a solid base, with FAOSTAT3 already representing state-of-the-art food and agriculture data worldwide. The usefulness and reliability of FAO data, which were, in part, questioned by the Editorial, are well demonstrated by its large, multi-faceted user base — with a total of almost 1.7 million visits every year — as well as by the frequent use of FAOSTAT data among the scientific community. A simple search on ScienceDirect using ‘FAOSTAT’ as a keyword, for instance, yields over 3,000 peer-reviewed papers published over the last five years, including several Nature papers focused on global food and agriculture issues4. In addition, a recent online FAO customer satisfaction survey, conducted anonymously among its users, showed that about 80% of its users, while demanding increased timeliness of data dissemination, were satisfied with FAOSTAT in terms of accessibility, relevance, consistency and accuracy of the statistics published.

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References

  1. Nat. Plants 5, 331 (2019).

  2. Tubiello, F. N. Nature 564, 190 (2018).

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  3. FAOSTAT (FAO, accessed 18 September 2019); http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home

  4. Tubiello, F. N. Nature 563, 35 (2018).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. FAO. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/ (2019).

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  1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy

    Pietro Gennari, Jose Rosero-Moncayo & Francesco N. Tubiello

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  1. Pietro Gennari
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  2. Jose Rosero-Moncayo
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  3. Francesco N. Tubiello
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Correspondence to Francesco N. Tubiello.

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Gennari, P., Rosero-Moncayo, J. & Tubiello, F.N. The FAO contribution to monitoring SDGs for food and agriculture. Nat. Plants 5, 1196–1197 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-019-0564-z

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