Needless to say, civilization began with agriculture, when people began to settle and grow their own food. Historically, agriculture has been playing a crucial role in human welfare ever since –providing a wide range of agricultural products in almost all aspects of life and being a key economic driver– and continues to remain as a major field in many parts of the world today, especially in developing countries. Therefore, it is obvious that effective agricultural management and policymaking can have a considerable effect on the development process of these countries. To ensure that management and provide data for those policies, agricultural statistics are essential.

In this respect, each country needs to track the developments in agricultural sector not only in its own country but also globally in the course of formulating agricultural policies and programs within the process of decision making. The policy-makers and planners need to rely on statistics for a description of the status and structure of the agricultural sector and for the analysis and projection of the existing trends.

For most of the OIC Member Countries, agriculture occupies a great portion of economic activity; the share of agricultural value added in GDP can be as high as 60 percent while an average of 40 percent of the population make living from agriculture and this ratio rises up to more than 90 percent in some countries. Considering this significance of agriculture for the Member Countries, we take the pleasure in introducing this volume of our series “Information on the OIC Countries” that is devoted to agriculture.