Increasing sustainable agricultural productivity is the number one challenge of the “The Future of Food and Agriculture” report of the Food and Agriculture Organization in response to a projected increase in demand for food by 50% between 2012 and 2050. In 2011 the G20 agricultural ministers launched the GEOGLAM initiative to “strengthen global agricultural monitoring by improving the use of remote sensing tools for crop production projections and weather forecasting".The data for national agricultural monitoring is in general collected by farm and household surveys but recently also the potential of satellite Earth Observation (EO) for agricultural statistics has been recognized.The advent of the Copernicus program and its observations collected by its Sentinel satellites provide an unprecedented open and free data set relevant for national agricultural monitoring down to field scale. However, national agricultural statistical services will rarely understand how to take advantage of Earth Obstervation tools without dedicated support.

The achievement of this meeting was to indentify further steps that, by additional information products and methodological development, can support for effective integration of workflows and reporting obligations. A concept paper about has been drafted at the closure of works, with the contribution of all the participants from FAO, ESA, GEO, WFP and World Bank.