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by Jan Cees Venema

Data portal aims to help unlock food production bottlenecks

FAO and IIASA launch online Global Agro-ecological Zones Interactive Data Portal

25 May 2012, Rome – A new online data portal developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) aims to help unlock the planet’s potential to feed a rapidly growing population.

The Global Agro-ecological Zones (GAEZ) Portal developed by FAO and IIASA is a planning tool designed to help to identify areas for   increased global food production while maintaining natural resources base and facing the challenge of climate change. According to FAO estimates, world food production needs to increase 60 percent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to surpass 9 billion people.

Much of the necessary growth will need to be achieved by increasing the amount of food produced on existing agricultural land, as most of the world’s best farmland is already being used.

Water scarcity is another limiting factor for area expansion. And intensification of food production will occur within a changing climate, requiring adaptation and mitigation and will have to be sustainable to safeguard future use of the resources.

A critical first step in sustainably intensifying food production is to close the “yield gaps” that continue to plague the farming sector in many parts of the world.

“GAEZ can help identify where there are ‘bridgeable yield gaps’ and what causes them, allowing for the formulation of appropriate investment policies and the provision of appropriate support to farmers to help them produce more food” says Parviz Koohafkan, Director of FAO’s Land and Water Division.

The term “yield gap” refers to the difference between how much food a farm actually produces and how much food it would be capable of producing if appropriate practices, inputs, technologies and knowledge were applied.

Such gaps can be quite wide: for example, a recent FAO study found that in some rural areas of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, crop production by small farmers, especially for cereals, can run as low as low as just 30-40 percent of potential.

The world region with the highest yield gaps is sub-Saharan Africa. Cereal yields in Africa as a whole have long hovered around 1.2 tons per hectare, compared to an average yield of some 3 tons per hectare in the developing world as a whole.

A wellspring of data, online

A new online data portal developed by FAO and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) seeks to enhance planners’ and decision makers’ capacity to estimate agricultural production potentials and variability under different environmental and management scenarios, including climatic conditions, management regimes, water availability and levels of inputs.

The portal — the Global Agro-Ecological Zones Interactive Data Access Facilities — offers access to what IIASA Director/CEO Pavel Kabat calls “the most ambitious global agro-resources assessment ever conducted”. “The objective was to assemble a vast wealth of data information and make this available in a way that is most accessible to land use planners and specialists to help close yield gaps and promote the sustainable intensification of agricultural production,” Kabat says.

At the heart of the GAEZ system is an extensive inventory of the world’s agricultural resources and related data, organized around five thematic areas:

  • Land and water resources, including multiple spatial layers of climate, soil, terrain, land cover, irrigation potentials, protected areas, population density, livestock density and accessibility, etc.
  • Agro-climatic resources,providing major climatic indicators important for assessing crop growth, development and yield formation. GAEZ’s spatial agro-climatic inventories of the prevailing thermal and moisture regimes and growing periods are used for estimating crop suitability and potential yields.
  • Agricultural suitability and potential yields, including information on yield constraints, crop calendars, and production potential estimates for 11 major crop groups, 49 major crops and 92 crop types. Productivity estimates are made for rain-fed farming, rain-fed farming with water conservation and gravity, sprinkler and drip irrigation systems.
  • Actual yields and production, consisting of spatially explicit crop production estimates including crop harvested area, yield and production figures for 23 major commodities.
  • Yield and production gaps, which provide important information on locations with differences between actual achieved and potential attainable yield and production under different management scenarios.

Being geo-referenced, GAEZ allows a user to identify agricultural zones across the globe that share similar ecological conditions and are producing the same crops using the same kinds of production system, but which do not have the same production levels. This means the reasons underlying lower production – inadequate or inappropriate agricultural practices, policies, institutions, support services and access to markets. – can be pinpointed and dealt with. The potential exists to expand food production efficiently while limiting impacts on other ecosystem values.

In particular, given the scarcity of suitable resources in some regions, future demand and expected negative impacts of climate change, GAEZ would allow users to evaluate options for more widespread adoption of sustainable land and water management practices in agricultural systems at risk, recently highlighted in FAO’s report The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.

These systems at risk face the threat of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity. They warrant priority attention for remedial action simply because there are no substitutes.

Alexander Mueller, Assistant Director General of the FAO Natural Resources Management and Environment Department, which developed GAEZ in collaboration with IIASA, concludes: “the new GAEZ data portal will provide a global tool to manage natural resources for food and agriculture in a more sustainable way. Natural resources are the basis for food production. In a world already facing today water scarcity and land degradation in many areas and coping with increasing risks from climate change, this is the only way to achieve food security.”

[from: FAO Media Center]

by Jan Cees Venema

Ghanaian woman receives Geospatial World Leadership Award

Ms Aida Opoku-Mensah, a Ghanaian national has been awarded with the ‘Geospatial World Leadership Award for Making a Difference’.

Ms Opoku-Mensah, who is also the Director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s (ECA) ICT, Science Technology Division, received the award during the 2012 Geospatial World Forum held in Amsterdam April 24, 2012.

According to a statement issued by the ECA, the citation for Ms Opoku-Mensah’s award read; she has “been a great advocate of geospatial technology in Africa and has provided leadership to several very valuable programmes and initiatives leading to capacity development of African countries with reference to geospatial competence and infrastructure, including promoting the UN GGIM initiative in Africa”.

Furthermore, the citation stated “her pro-active engagement with the geospatial community including academic institutions, policy makers, mapping agencies, the geospatial industry and end users has paved way for meaningful collaboration and cooperation amongst them for overall development of the continent”.

An elated Ms Opoku-Mensah accepting the award, said she was humbled by the recognition from the global geospatial community and stressed that she was only implementing the work programme of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, “which happens to be one of the few institutions that sees the strategic importance of geospatial technology for sustainable development, whether it’s in mining, natural resource management, monitoring elections, infrastructure development or measuring and managing the economy”.

The award is given to persons who have made significant contributions towards development of geographic information science, technology, products, applications, capacity development and in turn helped towards the growth of the geospatial industry as well as making geographic information a public commodity.

by Jan Cees Venema

On Global Agro-Ecological Zones

Land is an indispensable resource for the most essential human activities: it provides the basis for agriculture and forest production, water catchment, recreation, and settlement. The range of uses that can be made of land for human needs, is limited by environmental factors including climate, topography and soil characteristics, and is to a large extent determined by demographic, socio-economic, cultural, and political factors, such as population density, land tenure, markets, institutions, and agricultural policies.

In most developing countries, the needs and demands of rapidly increasing populations have been the principal driving force in the allocation of land resources to various kinds of uses, with food production as the primary land use. Population pressure and an increased competition among different land users have emphasized the need for more effective land-use planning and policies. Rational and sustainable land use is an issue of great concern to governments and to land users interested in preserving the land resources for the benefit of present and future populations. An integrated approach to planning and management of land resources is a key factor to implementing solutions which will ensure that land is allocated to uses providing the greatest sustainable benefit.

The increasing human population in several developing countries is placing pressure on the finite land resources, risking over-exploitation and land degradation. Sectoral and single objective approaches used to alleviate this situation have frequently not been effective. An integrated approach is required that involves all stakeholders, accommodates the qualities and limitations of each land unit, and produces viable land use options (FAO, 1995a).

 

Agro-Ecological Zones Approach

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with the collaboration of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), has developed a system, that enables rational land use planning on the basis of an inventory of land resources and evaluation of biophysical limitations and potentials. This is referred to as the Agro-ecological Zones (AEZ) methodology.

The AEZ methodology utilizes a land resources inventory to assess, for specified management conditions and levels of inputs, all feasible agricultural land-use options and to quantify expected production of cropping activities relevant in the specific agro-ecological context. The characterization of land resources includes components of climate, soils and landform, which are basic for the supply of water, energy, nutrients and physical support to plants.

Recent availability of digital global databases of climatic parameters, topography, soil and terrain, and land cover has allowed for revisions and improvements in calculation procedures and to expand assessments of AEZ crop suitability and land productivity potentials to temperate and boreal environments. This effectively enables global coverage for assessments of agricultural potentials and has led to this Global AEZ study.

via GAEZ Global Agro-Ecological Zones.

by Jan Cees Venema

Improving land tenure in developing countries through better cadastre systems

Cadastre systems – or land registration systems – are used throughout the world to record details of land ownership. The diffusion of modern Information Technology (IT) land registration systems have played an important role in diminishing corrupt and non-transparent land management practices. Such systems also improve the structure and accessibility of records, facilitate knowledge-based decision making and promote a wider data dissemination.

However, proprietary software for land registration systems can be costly, making their adoption in developing countries less likely. Yet many of these countries are eager for the benefits they can derive from implementation of appropriate IT systems. The Solutions for Open Land Administration (SOLA) project has been designed with these concerns in mind. This three-year trust fund project, financed by the Government of Finland, was launched in June 2011 with the objective of providing affordable IT systems to developing countries that will enable them to improve transparency and governance related to land registration.

The project is using open-source software. Unlike proprietary software, open-source software does not require costly licensing. Moreover, open-source software can be freely modified and adjusted by developers, who have access to the software’s “engine”. Another advantage with open-source software is that it is often more flexible and adaptable to local cadastre and registration practices and languages than proprietary software. Three countries – Samoa, Nepal and Ghana – are participating in the project’s pilot phase, implementing the software for their own land registration systems. Initial work on the project has been promising, according to SOLA Project coordinator, Neil Pullar, “The SOLA project is at exciting stage. The initial generic SOLA software developed in Rome is now largely completed and software customization work begins in the 3 pilot countries in March. The Rome software developers are now busy preparing for the training of the local software development teams in each of the pilot countries.”

Read more >> http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/an501e/an501e00.pdf