Improving Agricultural Statistics in the COMCEC Region

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People in rural areas communally use naturally-grown shrubs/trees with unknown

production relations,

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The forestry department is ill-equipped to manage the national forests.

Additionally, herbal medicinal traders usually underestimate the volume of their border

trading in order to avoid the high Customs duties. The same information problem applies to

the issue on animal husbandry. Therefore, the outputs from animal production, forests and

medicinal spices trading made by the National Accounts are generally underestimated.

A solution to this important but absent data on forests and animal production is to review the

methods of collecting statistics on these missing indicators. Work has been administered by

MAIL on preparing land use maps for Afghanistan, using satellite imaging. Since it is often

difficult to differentiate the various types of shrubs and trees in the satellite images,

supporting verification activities are conducted on the ground using ground check farm

management surveys. Together with these satellite images, the CSO could use a master Sample

Frame for agricultural statistics, followed by an integrated survey framework and an

integrated database, to establish a solid path for the integration of agriculture into the national

system of Afghanistan.

Although awareness does exist regarding the importance of the CSO, as the main provider for

statistics to all other national institutions, this needs to be strengthened. The Department of

Agricultural Statistics of MAIL processes all the micro-data it collects from the field and passes

it on to the CSO for further aggregation and analysis, and finally for dissemination. It also

collects its macro statistics from the CSO National Accounts to prepare its own publications for

internal use, as well as for interested institutions in the public and private domains. This

illustrates the two-way relationship, almost like a built-in agricultural statistics supply chain,

between the Agricultural Statistics Department of MAIL with the ESD of CSO.

In terms of human resources, there is a lack of staff in the provinces. So, instead of collecting

primary information, they are dependent on collating administrative data from donor projects

and other national agricultural institutions. Apart from limited staff, the Agricultural Statistics

Department also lacks the technical know-how of data collection, processing and analysis. This

is in spite of the generous funding provided by donors, who unfortunately focus on productive

projects rather than improving the procedures of data collection and processing. Notably, the

entry point to success is to learn by conducting hands-on data collection, processing and

analysis.

Using both statistics provided at the national level from CSO and its own regional aggregate

agricultural data, the Agricultural Statistics Department produces three agricultural outlook

reports, monthly, quarterly and annually.

iii.

Resources of the Agricultural System

Human Resources:

The number of staff for agricultural statistics is about 26, including six

senior, 20 mid-level staff. These 26 staffs are subdivided into 6 staff for CSO and 20 for MAIL.

CSO, 2012.

CSO, 2012 and CSO, 2014a.