FAOSTAT: Rural Livelihoods: Rural Livelihoods Indicators

The FAOSTAT Employment indicators domain focuses on indicators related to employment in agrifood systems and rural areas. The update is performed yearly, using data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) database that contains a rich set of indicators from a wide range of topics related to labour statistics. The indicators published in FAOSTAT are derived from the labour force statistics (LFS) and rural and urban labour markets (RURURB) databases of the ILOSTAT database.

Table of discontinued FAOSTAT indicators from household surveys covering gender, area and socioeconomics, with rows giving area code, area, item, element, year, unit and value. Published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

This dataset provides annual statistics on crop and livestock production across countries and territories. For crops, data are provided on area harvested, production quantities and yields. For livestock, data are provided on animal stocks, numbers of producing and slaughtered animals, and the production of meat, milk, eggs and other livestock products. The dataset also includes information on production quantities for selected processed products, such as vegetable oils, sugar, fibres, beer, wine and major dairy products.

The Suite of Gender Indicators presents a set of indicators relevant to agrifood systems that are disaggregated by sex, with the aim of highlighting gender differences across agrifood systems. The initial set of indicators is based on those used in FAO’s 2023 Status of Women in Agrifood Systems (SWAFS) report and on the recommendations of an expert consultation held in December 2023, and covers key dimensions including economic participation, governance, agency, social norms, assets and services, education, health, and nutrition. Indicator selection was informed by expert judgment and by the availability of data with sufficient geographic and temporal coverage to enable meaningful comparisons across regions and over time. While most indicators are produced and published by FAO and other international organizations, the objective of this domain is to provide a one-stop shop for sex-disaggregated data on agrifood systems.

The food and nutrient apparent consumption statistics were computed from Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey (HCES) data. HCES is an umbrella term for household-level surveys developed to inform economic policy, such as Household Budget Surveys, Household Income Expenditure Surveys, and Living Standard Measurement Surveys. These surveys collect information on household characteristics (e.g., region and urban-rural), household members characteristics (e.g., sex, age, education, food and non-food expenditures, etc.), and food quantities consumed and/or acquired during a reference period. Despite their limitations HCES have been used for producing food and nutrient apparent consumption estimates at national and subnational levels for the whole population.

Data from censuses of agriculture are collected at the holding level and provide information about the structure of agriculture of a country or a territory (e.g. size and number of holdings, land tenure, legal status, and sex of the holder). However, countries may apply their own definitions of agricultural holdings, which could affect the international comparability of census data. National censuses are conducted at least once every ten years. The "Structural data from agricultural censuses" domain in FAOSTAT provides structural data from the WCA rounds (WCA 1930, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020) for each participating country and territory, to the extent possible. The data are prepared based on the national census reports and other dissemination products available in the public domain or directly provided by member countries to FAO, also disseminated by FAO through its census-related publications, and recent methodological review of the available country census data of the WCA 2020 round.