Today, the FAO Statistics Division released a new Statistics Working Paper titled "Proxy approach for status and trend assessments of productive and sustainable agriculture". 

Effective monitoring of the current status and progress of productive and sustainable agriculture is essential for policymakers and researchers. While efforts to implement the farm-level Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 2.4.1 – the proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture – are ongoing, current data availability is insufficient for global assessments.

Building on earlier monitoring efforts to assess progress towards sustainable agriculture (Tubiello et al. 2021), and following consultations with countries, a proxy approach based on existing national data has now been developed and approved to address these data and reporting gaps.

This paper discusses the underlying reporting mechanisms of the seven constituent subindicators of the proxy approach and presents the most recent observations at the global and regional levels. The proxy approach has its own limitations, as it does not capture all the farm-level indicators included in the original methodology. However, it can be used for comparisons with other ongoing efforts, and it can be further improved for a more accurate portrayal of sustainable agriculture.