Current Gaps in Global Agricultural Monitoring Systems

Agricultural monitoring systems provide up-to-date information to different actors and decision makers in support of food security. To help reduce price volatility a global agricultural monitoring system is essential to ensure the coordinated flow of information in a timely manner for early warning purposes. Numerous systems now exist for this purpose. The present study is intended to comparatively study the eight main global and regional scale agricultural monitoring systems currently in operation. It is based on the input data and models used, the outputs produced, the role of the analyst, their interaction with other systems and the geographical scale at which they operate. Despite improvements in access to high resolution satellite imagery over the last decade and the use of numerous remote-sensing based products by the different systems, still fundamental gaps exist. Among the system experts and the literature, the main gaps in the data and the methods are identified. Suggestions are put forward for addressing these gaps through improvements in remote sensing, as well as harnessing and sharing new and innovative data.