Crop monitoring and yield forecasting at global level: The GLOBCAST project from the European Commission

Abstract

Recent trends in global agriculture prices have brought a new scenario for agricultural policies worldwide. Increased world demand for agricultural products combined with inter-annual fluctuations of global production mostly caused by climate variability have been an important cause for price volatility in agricultural markets, and social unrest in many parts of the world. In this context, crop monitoring and yield forecasting play a major role in anticipating supply anomalies, thus allowing well-informed timely policy action and market adjustment, preventing food crises and market disruptions, reducing market speculation, and contributing to overall increased food security. This is the objective of international initiatives such as AMIS (Agricultural Market Information System) at global level established in 2011 after the request of G-20 (http://www.amis-outlook.org/) or MED-Amin (https://med-amin.ciheam.org/en/) in the Mediterranean, launched in 2014 and coordinated by CIHEAM. The European Commission (EC) DG AGRICULTURE launched and financed a three-phase project named GLOBCAST in 2011, an initiative to demonstrate the feasibility and operationalization of a project for crop monitoring and forecasting in the world’s main grain producing areas. This project includes the set-up of two main systems. The first system, is dedicated to the estimation of crop areas through the integration of area sampling and remote sensing methods (Carfagna and Gallego, 2005). The second one, presented in this paper, is about forecasting yields. The global yield forecasting system represents an extension of the current European system (the MARS Crop Yield Forecasting System, or M-CYFS) to other world regions with a high relevance on agricultural market prices. The main output of the current European system, run since 1992 by the Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit (MARS) of the EC Joint Research Centre, is a monthly bulletin on crop monitoring and yield forecasting in Europe (http://mars.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mars/Bulletins-Publications) with quantitative yield forecasts and country analysis reports on crop development. This article presents the basic principles of this new global crop yield forecasting system: the conceptual design of the system, the regions of the world to be covered, and the specific technical solutions to be implemented.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource