ECONOMIC IDEAL – Tehran, Feb 10, IRNA – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) urges its member countries to accelerate improvements of agricultural data to ensure the targets set out by the UN to achieve sustainable development are accurately reported in the world’s biggest region – Asia and the Pacific.
Chief Statistician of FAO, Pietro Gennari, noted the significant data gaps in Asia-Pacific in monitoring the progress towards achieving sustainable development, the report of FAO reads.
Slow country commitment to measuring the data, and the poor performance towards achieving sustainable development, are closely connected, it adds.
“We are witnessing an inversion of the familiar axiom whereby ‘what gets measured gets done’. We are not measuring the sustainable development indicators, and this is one of the crucial reasons why we are not on track to achieving the targets,” it further adds.
Adding to the many firsts, FAO recently announced its initiative to help countries use satellite data to generate agricultural statistics, the report stated.
“This new data source is part of what we call Big Data, and its development is often led by the private sector. Partnering with the private sector allows us to innovate, and is a game-changer in how governments produce official statistics,” said, FAO Regional Statistician, Sangita Dubey.
FAO, as the lead UN agency dedicated to increasing food and agricultural development, advocates for new approaches to develop an integrated system of agricultural census and surveys, enhance data quality assurance, produce and share privacy-protected microdata, and provide crop, livestock and fisheries statistics in a cost-effective manner.
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