Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region
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Since the results are still preliminary and performed independently by different agencies with
little coordination, for this study it was decided to use the results by grouping the COMCEC
Member Countries in capacity development categories: A denoting the best and D denoting the
worst performance categories.
The first observation is that except for seven COMCEC Members (Bahrain, Oman, Palestine,
Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Brunei) there are at least one capacity index recorded
by AfDB, FAO or World Bank for all other COMCEC Members. The second observation is that
COMCEC Members performed better in the methodology dimension than other dimensions.
Third, the best performers overall in agricultural statistics are Egypt, Iran, Jordan Saudi Arabia,
Morocco, Malaysia and Iraq. The worst performers are Gabon, Guinea, Togo and Yemen. While
different assessments are generally similar across the board, there are also surprisingly high
differences in some cases. Sudan and Morocco are two of such cases.
One of the indicators of availability is the online access to agricultural statistics. This has also
been targeted in part 3 of the SSAQ. The respondents were asked to report if an agricultural
database exists and if so, whether it is available online. The respondents were then asked to
provide the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) if it is available. To test their responses, the given
URLs were visited and attempts were made to retrieve the agricultural statistics.
Table 17 summarizes the expert scoring of the agricultural statistics web pages. The pages
were graded on the basis of ease of access, language alternatives, timeliness of the information
that can be retrieved, richness of the data that can be found, availability of metadata,
availability of information and results of agricultural surveys and censuses, online search for
data capability, possibility for online inquiry/request submissions, and coverage of
agricultural statistics. The results showed that responses to SSAQ significantly overestimated
the availability of databases and online accesses to agricultural statistics in COMCEC Member
Countries.
Therefore, it was decided that the expert evaluation of online availability of agricultural
statistics, rather than the information provided in the SSAQs would be used. On average, IASD
Asian and Arab groups provided better web dissemination than the African group. Turkey,
Indonesia and Albania in the Asian group, Sudan and Iraq in the Arab group, and Nigeria and
Mozambique in the African group provided the best online access to agricultural statistics.
Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Suriname in the Asian group, Somalia, Mauritania and Comoros
in the Arab group, and Guinea and Sierra Leone in the African group provided the poorest
online access to their statistics.