The Government of Lebanon has launched a Farmer Registry. This registry is being used for expanding social protection coverage to farmers as well as for providing them access to agricultural services.

"The registry will provide us with accurate knowledge of all the details in the agricultural sector, the cultivated areas, and the quality of the crops, and thus improve our ability to determine the quantities of production ... and match needs with capabilities", said the Minister of Agriculture of the Government of Lebanon, Abbas Hajj Hassan.

The Ministry of Agriculture led the development of the registry with technical support of FAO and financial support of the EU. More specifically, FAO supported the Government in designing and piloting the registry, in identifying socio-economic indicators to include in the registry, and in training users.The registry helps the Government in identifying the farmers that are most urgently in need of social protection and agricultural interventions and disaster response.

In addition, the process of registering farmers constitutes the building block for formalizing agricultural activities and thereby providing the opportunity of enrolling them in contributory social insurance schemes.

The use of technology and digital data has grown enormously in recent years both in the social and agricultural sectors. Recently, FAO and GIZ developed a note describing the benefits of linking social and farmer registries (FAO and GIZ, 2022).  Linkages between these registries can play an important role in expanding coverage of social protection to rural populations.