Working Group 5

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY

The food demand is still increasing in the 21st century under rapid population growth, diet transition from grain to meat, use of crops for bio-fuel, etc., while facing the shortage of arable land and water resource for sufficient food production, and frequently occurring extreme weather conditions under global warming which are terrifying stable productivity of food. Moreover, we have to break the dependency of agricultural production on excessive use of chemicals which causes serious environmental impact and food safety issues. Namely, we need to simultaneously accomplish both high productivity and sustainability against several constraints, contributing to SDG 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture).

Realizing that global/regional/local scale earth observation is one of the most important key factors to address those issues by optimizing complex conditions, several groups have been involved in providing satellite observations and ground level observations with statistical information collection and trying to apply such data with some model for agriculture including crop yield forecast, crop growth outlook and agriculture damage assessment. In spite of the importance of merging data from different platforms such as satellite observations and ground observations for better decision support, there are just few good applications of such multi-platform data integration with model and available statistical information.

In this working group, participants representing different observation platforms and decision support system developments will interact to learn about the present status and perspectives of multi-platform observations, and discuss how to provide multi-platform observation environment to achieve sustainable food production particularly focusing on the utilization of wide range of the observations from different domains such as water management, biodiversity, forest management etc., in order to fulfil the above constraints, while clarifying the short-term and long-term goals of the observations. The results of the discussion will lead us to the Input to GEO GLAM (Global Agriculture Monitoring) project for G20 action plan, especially Asia rice crop team activity in GEO GLAM and other international projects including FAO AFSIS, etc.

Co-Chairs:
• Nguyen Lam Dao (STAC, VNSC, VAST)
• Kelly Hayden (UN ESCAP)
• Seishi Ninomiya (The University of Tokyo);