Highlights:
This report presents a high-level landscape analysis of global food security and agriculture information systems. The objective is to analyze the current state of affairs with regards to the leading systems, their functions, gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for improvement.
The study reviewed 26 different global food security and agriculture information systems, with a close examination of their effectiveness and efficiencies in ensuring that core food security information is available to decision makers for any country of concern in near real time.
The analysis shows that the landscape of agricultural and food security systems is complex, with several comprehensive systems that address both domains. About half of the systems provided primary information that comes from original sources, while the remainder were information aggregators, which combine and visualize information from multiple other (primary) data providers.
The analysis indicated that many of the selected systems present overlapping information services.
At the same time, the analysis also identified several gaps in information services when compared to what is needed to create an ideal agricultural and food security monitoring system. A critical gap was the lack of any systems that monitor livestock and fishery conditions, which are key components of the diet in many countries. Another gap was the imperfect geographical coverage of local price monitoring and agricultural market systems. For food security analysis critical gaps existed in the geographic coverage to include all countries of concern; and to make linkages between acute and chronic food insecurity to inform both humanitarian and development-oriented interventions.
The study identified opportunities to make better use of global information systems by linking them up more explicitly to share data, bring models together, and conduct joint analysis. Emerging opportunities include:
Opportunity 1: Establish inter agency networks and collaborations
Opportunity 2: Shift from agency-owned silos to a global public good
Opportunity 3: Increase the use of advanced analytical approaches and technologies
Opportunity 4: Link better with regional and national systems
Opportunity 5: Address critical data weaknesses
Opportunity 6: Make better linkages between chronic and acute food insecurity
Opportunity 7: Rationalize donor financing of information systems to be more strategic
The study concludes with the following key recommendations for consideration by global funders of agriculture and food security information systems:
Recommendation #1: Develop a common vision for a global public good that can deliver core and essential information required to achieve SDG 2.
Recommendation #2: Rationalize donor financing for agriculture and food security information systems to be more strategic, sustained, efficient, and effective towards creating a global public good that can deliver core and essential information. And conversely, it is recommended that donors stop financing systems in an ad hoc and fragmented manner, which creates redundancies, inefficiencies, and critical information gaps.
Recommendation #3: Leverage the influence of the international donor community to lobby for a global institutional mandate and structure for a public good (such as the SDG custodial model) that can provide core and essential agriculture and food security information.
Recommendation #4: Leverage donor influence with agencies implementing information systems to commit to data sharing and interoperability, and in particular to link to existing platforms that are already integrating information from various systems to provide a single trusted source of food security and agriculture analysis (e.g., AMIS, GEOGLAM and IPC).
Recommendation #5: Commission a study that conducts a critical evaluation of the costs and benefits of the existing systems, eventually resulting in the selection and support of a limited number of specialized and integrated systems.
Recommendation #6: Finance efforts to develop systems and analyze not just acute food insecurity, but chronic food insecurity as well; and to make stronger linkages between acute crises and their underlying/structural causes which can inform development-oriented interventions in agriculture, policy, and economic growth.
Recommendation #7. Finance efforts to provide critical data gaps, in particular nutrition/mortality data with SMART surveys, and conflict analysis.
