Historical and real-time agriculture information are vital to modern agricultural economies and is the topic of a training workshop organized by FAO and SUPARCO under the USDA funded project “Agricultural Information Systems - Building Provincial Capacity for Crop Estimation, Forecasting and Reporting based on the Integral Use of Remotely Sensed Data” in Lahore on 24-25 April 2013. The objective of the web-based Crop Information Portal is to provide historical crop and meteorological data for analysis and better prediction of future harvests. Training includes live demonstration, discussion and feedbacks from the Crop Reporting Services in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh as well as university researchers from University of Agriculture Faisalabad and Tandojam (Sindh) who are supporting the development with SUPARCO expters. It will make available to web users the historical archive and the latest produced crop and agro-meteorological data, integrated with satellite based information. The system will allow timely access to all the available data, perform statistical analysis, and generate analytical reports. FAO and SUPARCO have collaborated in defining user requirements, technical specifications, and activities to implement the system.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has organized a One Day Workshop in Lahore’s Government Engineering Academy on 23 April 2013 to assess a new large area irrigation system management tool called “Mapping System and Services for Canal Operation Techniques (MASSCOTE)”. The analytical tool has been developed with FAO Member country experiences under the Natural Resources Division of FAO. Dr Robina Wahaj, Irrigation Expert from FAO Headquarters in Rome, presented the MASSCOTE process to over 50 irrigation experts from Punjab receiving important feedback. ADB’s Mr Raza M Farrukh, Senior Project Officer, noted that such system tools have potential to provide objective investment decisions and to modernize some aspects of Pakistan’s irrigation system – which is the world’s largest contiguous irrigation area but over 100 years old. After many years of providing excellent service, new challenges to the agriculture sector and need for improvement of performance, MASSCOTE is one tool which may help in upgrading management of the system and add value to the large irrigation infrastructure investments by the Government of Pakistan, ADB, JICA and World Bank in recent years. For further information on MASSCOTE see www.fao.org/nr/water.

Livelihood Recovery Appraisal (LRA) which was carried out by the members of the Food Security Cluster and covers 2010/2011 flood affected districts. The main objectives of LRA are: to evaluate the recovery pattern of flood affected households; to assess the impact and effectiveness of interventions; and to understand the problems and issues that remain for livelihood recovery of affected communities.