Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
127
OPPORTUNITIES
 Change and improvement in government
policies related to official statistics
 Paying more attention to agricultural
statistics by decision makers
 Change in perception and trust to statistics
in public
 Leadership in the developing world in the
area of agricultural statistics
 Census of Agriculture in 2013
 Participation in CountrySTAT
 Use of area frame sampling
 Online Agricultural Statistics Database
 Supports for capacity building as short-
term programmes and specific projects in
order to produce basic statistics in the SCI
 Human resources with technical knowledge
and necessary specialties
 Awareness of different modern methods for
producing statistics
 Awareness of international
recommendations and classifications
 Good monitoring by National Statistical
High Council
 Increasing expectations and demands
THREATS
 Size of informal sector (home production
and consumption)
 Provision of appropriate budget for
agricultural statistics activities
 International organization requests not
consistent with national needs and
priorities
 Political pressure on statistics
 Retirement of experienced staff and non-
replacement
 Agricultural statistics data not disseminated
and kept for internal use in some other
ministries
 Increasing expectations and demands
NEEDS
 Aligning agricultural statistics to user and policy needs
 A comprehensive, interactive and accessible database on agricultural statistics
 A micro and metadata dissemination policy
 Publicly known data dissemination calendar
 Satellite and quarterly accounts for agriculture
 Censuses of greenhouses; Surveys of irrigated land, farm structure, production cost; Production
and input utilization accounts.
 Consistency check of statistics produced and used by different institutions
 Updating of farm registers
 Evaluation and audit of major statistical surveys and reporting of confidence intervals
 Improving the visibility of the agricultural statistics
 Strengthening statistical coordination among the various partners
 Stopping the erosion in qualified human resources
 Revision in ICT equipments and software
 Training on modern methodologies for production of agricultural statistics
 Training on modern statistical methodologies,
 Training on use of modern tools (statistical software eg.)
 Study visits to other countries exchanges experiences and practices on the agricultural
statistics