Agro-MAPS (FAO)

Agro-MAPS is an interactive web-based information system on land use which contains statistics on primary food crops, aggregated by sub-national administrative districts, on crop production, area harvested and crop yields. The database was originally developed as a joint initiative by FAO, IFPRI (the International Food Policy Institute), SAGE (The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment) and CIAT (The International Center for Tropical Agriculture) to support a variety of applications being developed separately by the three institutions. Agriculture is a major source of employment and use of land in many developing countries. The raw statistics and directly derived information available through Agro-MAPS therefore represent a limited, yet very important component of land use.

Agro-MAPS permits regional to global overviews of crop production statistics and their spatial variation with a sub national level of detail. Agro-MAPS data are obtained mainly from published reports on national agricultural censuses, usually carried out every 5 to 10 years, or from annual estimates reported in published sources. The data are subject to minor pre-processed in order to ensure overall consistency and enhance accuracy of the final integrated database. This includes (i) replacement of non-standard crop names and statistic descriptions with standardized FAO unique identifier codes (ii) conversion when necessary, of data on ‘production’, ‘area harvested’ and ‘yield’ to standardized reporting units (i.e. metric tons, hectare and metric tons per hectare, respectively). Where possible, differentiation is made between ‘not reported’ and true ‘zero’ values. Basic meta-data, including citation of original sources, are included