Page 277 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS243 Arbab A. K
1. Background
Transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has obligated sound national
statistical systems to provide the data needed to monitor progress towards
meeting these goals. The quality and availability of agricultural statistics is of
paramount importance in measuring the progress to achieve the SDGs related
to food and agriculture. However, in the absence of any long term national
strategy for the development of statistics in general and/or agricultural
statistics in particular, necessitate countries to improve their agricultural
statistics system for the production of adequate quantity and better quality
agricultural statistics.
The lack of vision and political will for improving statistics in many
developing countries steered the strategic planning process in the statistics
production. While the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st
Century (PARIS21) advocated the National Strategy for the Development of
Statistics (NSDS) for the overall development of the national statistical
systems, the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics
(GSARS) established a comprehensive framework for improving the quality,
availability and use of agricultural and rural data.
The Global Strategy as an international partnership was funded by Gates
foundation, DFID AND Italian cooperation and was administratively housed by
the Economic and Statistics Division of Food and Agriculture Organization of
the United Nations (FAO). The ultimate aim of the project in its phase 1 was to
improve the steady decline in the availability and quality of agricultural and
rural statistics in developing countries. The Global Strategy provides a
framework to enable national and international statistical systems to produce
the basic agricultural information needed to guide decision making.
The Strategy is based on three pillars:
Pillar 1: Establish a minimum set of core data required to meet current
and emerging needs.
Pillar 2: Integrate agriculture into national statistical systems and use
sound data management systems; and
Pillar 3: Establish suitable governance processes and build the necessary
statistical capacity to ensure sustainability of agricultural statistics
systems.
This paper highlights the major technical areas outlined in SPARS and its
progress in 19 implementing countries of Asia Pacific region from 2013 to
2019. (Note: The SPARS guidelines and cost effective methodologies and
technical areas highlighted below were also delivered to countries that were
not covered by GSARS).

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