Today, more than 80 low-income developing countries suffer from chronic food deficits and over 840 million people go hungry. In 1996 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) held the World Food Summit [1] where world leaders gathered in Rome and committed their countries to reducing the number of hungry by half by the year 2015. FAO was seen to play a major role towards this objective by encouraging and monitoring progress, and re-focussing its own programmes on the goals of the Summit.
To better guide its work for the two decades following the World Food Summit, FAO developed “The Strategic Framework for FAO, 2000-2015” [2], which was approved by the FAO Conference at its 30th Session in November 1999. FAO’s Strategic Framework is built on 5 major corporate strategies to:
contribute to the eradication of food insecurity and rural poverty [3];
develop, promote and reinforce policy and regulatory frameworks for food, agriculture, fisheries and forestry;
create sustainable increases in the supply and availability of food and other products from the crop, livestock, fisheries and forestry sectors;
support the conservation, improvement and sustainable use of natural resources for food and agriculture; and
improve decision-making through the provision of information and assessments and fostering of knowledge management for food and agriculture.
Having recognized information and knowledge management as one of the five key strategies to achieve the goals of the World Food Summit, FAO reinforced the World Agricultural Information Centre [4] as a corporate framework for agricultural information management and dissemination. The WAICENT framework integrates and harmonizes standards, tools and procedures for the efficient and effective management and dissemination of high-quality technical information, including relevant and reliable statistics, texts, maps, and multimedia resources.
With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, there have been enormous advances in information technology and the task of managing and disseminating information in a digital environment has become increasingly complex. As a result, at FAO the following tasks are assuming greater importance: to enable better access to FAO's information resources; to promote partnerships with other agricultural information networks; and to assist FAO Member Nations to build their own capacity to manage and utilize food and agricultural information. This paper highlights some of FAO’s many activities that support these tasks.
FAO has been one of the first institutions to embrace the concept of institutional digital information repositories. In 1995, FAO established a support structure to foster the dissemination of agricultural information through WAICENT. Among the many such specialized information access systems is the FAO Corporate Document Repository [5] which is described in section two.
The FAO Web site [6] provides access to information on agriculture, forestry, fisheries, sustainable rural development, economics, food and nutrition. It is a comprehensive source of agricultural information, having approximately 500 000 web pages, over 100 databases, and thousands of documents. With over two million visits per month, the Web site gives access to the accumulated knowledge and expertise of FAO. This information helps to guide decision-makers and professionals in finding solutions to the challenges of sustainable agriculture development and hunger. To understand better the users of the FAO Web site and their specific information needs, FAO has undertaken three rounds of surveys of delegates at major meetings in Rome as well as sent a mission to Ghana. The methodology used and some of the significant conclusions made are presented in section three.
Effective information integration, retrieval, and exchange require agreed standards. For over 20 years, FAO has been setting standards in information management in agricultural development and food security. FAO works with Member Nations and other partners to develop and disseminate global standards and procedures for agricultural information management and exchange. For example, the agricultural metadata standards initiative [7] and the Agricultural Ontology Service [8] are two internationally-recognized initiatives led by FAO and aimed at improving standards globally within the WAICENT framework. With partners such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research [9] and National Agricultural Libraries of Member Countries, FAO promotes the adoption of standards for agricultural data exchange and retrieval through the adoption of XML and other new techniques [10]. Section four of this paper gives an overview of FAO’s activities in this area.
FAO works closely with stakeholders in Member Nations and fosters international partnerships under the WAICENT framework to develop facilities and networks for access to and sharing of agricultural information. Some areas of collaboration include improving efficiency, quality and relevance of knowledge exchange in agriculture, and using electronic media to enhance communication for rural development. The following two activities are discussed in section five.
Capacity Building Activities - advice and technical assistance for governments, institutions and rural communities to strengthen capacities in agricultural information management and the effective use of information and communication technologies.
The Information Management Resource Kit - a partnership-based e-learning initiative comprising a comprehensive suite of distance learning resources covering concepts, approaches and tools for agricultural information management.
