Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
1
Introduction
Three out of four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas, and rely directly or
indirectly on agriculture to sustain their livelihoods. Although declining over time, more than
one third of the global population earns its living from agriculture, proven by over a quarter of
the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) being generated from agricultural revenue. In
addition to its positive role in providing food, clothing, fuel, and housing for a growing world
population, agricultural development is now seen as a vital and high-impact source of
employment and poverty reduction. On the negative side, agriculture is seen as a source of
environmental problems and a contributor to global warming, water scarcity, pollution and
land degradation.1
In order for the agricultural sector to meet the demands of the increasing world population in
a sustainable manner – in both the food and non-food sectors – focus needs to be onsetting
proper policies. The need to develop sound, effective and efficient agricultural policies and to
monitor them requires comprehensive, reliable and timely information on the agricultural
sector. The nature of problems and policies relating to agriculture is ever-changing, and
consequently so is the demand for agricultural statistics. In order to cope with this,
international organizations and many countries have begun to set up complex systems of data
gathering methodologies, technologies, surveys and databases, based on a harmonized and
integrated set of information. The design, implementation and maintenance of such
information require significant financial, physical and human resources.
Over the past few decades, there has been an explosion in the volume of national and
international data on agriculture made available electronically. Nevertheless, accessing
accurate information in a timely manner is a significant challenge because often the
information available is unfortunately not what is needed, and what is needed is either
unaccessible or non-existent. Furthermore, very often even when data is available and
accessible, it is not useful because it is not in the right format or sufficient detail: parts are
missing or do not fit together to the consolidated information. 2
The Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the Organization of
Islamic Cooperation (COMCEC) is, as a body of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC),
the main multilateral economic and commercial cooperation platform of the Islamic world. The
COMCEC Coordination Office prepared the COMCEC Strategy, which was adopted by the 4th
Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference held on 14-15 August 2012 in Mecca.
The COMCEC Strategy, with agriculture as one of its six areas of cooperation set increasing the
productivity of agricultural sector and sustaining food security in the COMCEC Region as its
strategic objective. The COMCEC Strategy also highlighted the lack of reliable and up-to-date
data as one of the common challenges of the agriculture sector in the COMCEC Region.
1 World Bank, 2011.
2 Kasnakoglu, 2009.