The Food and Agriculture Organization launched the Food and Agriculture Microdata (FAM) catalogue, this new tool provides an inventory of datasets collected through farm and household surveys which contain information related to agriculture, food security,  and nutrition. As of July 2019, the FAM contains more than 350 datasets with unit-level information on households and farms, including data used to compute the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), and agricultural census and surveys for Indonesia, Nepal, Nigeria, and Rwanda. 

The FAM represents an important new tool for FAO and member countries as the world increasingly relies on micro datasets for conducting research, tailoring programmes and policy interventions, and monitoring national and global development agendas. In particular, these datasets will address the growing demand for highly granular and disaggregated microdata to monitor the SDG indicators related to hunger (2.1.2), small-holder productivity (2.3.1, 2.3.2), agricultural sustainability (2.4.1), women’s ownership of agricultural land (5.a.1), and many others. Moreover, with the publication of the underlying microdata, now every user can replicate the estimates published by FAO, increasing in this way the transparency and credibility of FAO’s statistical work.

FAM is deployed using the NADA application developed by the World Bank and used by countries and international institutions (including the International Household Survey Network (IHSN)) all over the world. It leverages the Data Documentation Initiative metadata standard ensuring high quality, and enabling FAM to interoperate with other NADA based microdata dissemination platforms. 

In the coming months, many more national agricultural census and survey datasets will be added, as well as rich microdata collected directly by FAO and never before released. Statisticians, researchers, policy analysts and other users are highly encouraged to visit the FAM catalogue to request access to datasets, or simply browse to see what is available. Moreover, national statistical offices and international institutions are encouraged to contact [email protected] if they would like to make their micro datasets discoverable in FAM, directly disseminate their datasets though the platform, or link their own NADA based catalogue.