Regular census will promote agricultural growth, a university don has said.
According to Prof Abiodun Adeloye, a former Dean, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ilorin (UNILORIN), regular census is crucial if the government wishes to implement evidence-based policies to foster agriculture and rural development, ensure access to land, improve food security and reduce the adverse environmental impacts of agricultural activities.
Globally, he said, agric census provides information on the structure of the sector, including the number and size of holdings. It also gives information about land use, crop area, crop intensity, irrigation facilities, agricultural input use, livestock numbers, as well as farmer demographics and employment.
It covers figures on crop and animal production. The data form a source in the calculation of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Besides, the private sector needs such data to make informed decisions to guide their investments.
He expressed concern that available data was not comprehensive enough to aid planning and decision making, adding that the nation needed to create data platforms and capacities for farmers to understand what crops grow best and where.
Meanwhile, climate change and its pressure on agriculture are adding fresh urgency for accurate data amid a fast-changing agricultural landscape.
Statisticians and analysts said issues surrounding climate change were also adding to the challenges posed by food insecurity, poverty and undernourishment.
Experts at a regional meeting of the World Programme for the Census of Agriculture (WCA) 2020 held September in Kenya said African countries have some capacity to conduct census on agriculture because 22 countries from the region participated in the last census held in 2010. But they added that there is a need for more capacity building and financial investments to ensure more countries conduct censuses.
The experts were concerned that available agricultural data in the region was not comprehensive enough to aid planning and decision making in the sector.
The meeting that was organised by the Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) brought together agricultural research scientists and policymakers to discuss new features of the WCA 2020 in the light of UN’s Agenda 2030 on sustainable development and other initiatives.
FAO senior statistician, Jairo Castano, said with about 800 million people malnourished globally, it is imperative that governments and development agencies have accurate, timely and accessible data for decision making.
“Africa has the highest number of undernourished people but most countries have poor capacity for collecting, analysing and disseminating agricultural data,” said Castano. “This is because of low investments and prioritisation of agricultural data.”
He urged African countries to improve their capacity to conduct well managed agricultural census, citing confidence provided by the FAO through roundtables to prepare countries for the 2020 census.
The meeting was organised for 20 African countries including Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
According to Castano, some agricultural officials have inadequate or no basic data such as number of farmers in their countries and the average age of the farming population. He said that the continent needs to strengthen the quality and availability of data if it wants to feed the rising population.
The FAO has organised the 2020 WCA under 15 themes including land, irrigation, crops, livestock, demographics and social characteristics, household food security, fisheries and aquaculture.
Kenya’s cabinet secretary for agriculture, livestock and fisheries, Willy Bett, said that the country will conduct its first ever comprehensive agricultural census in 2019 whose methodology will be informed by the WCA 2020 guidelines.
“Owing to our unique farming systems, Africa needs data more than any other parts of the world,” said Bett adding that African countries are faced by systematic challenges that hinder generation and management of high quality agricultural data and statistics.
In 2015, the Food Agriculture Organisation (FA0) released a set of updated guidelines to assist governments in carrying out their national-level agricultural censuses in 2016. It is the latest edition of guidelines which FAO provides every 10 years.
Based on countries’ experiences and lessons learnt over previous decades, the new guidelines form part of the FAO coordinated World Programme for the Census of Agriculture, which covers the period 2016-2025. For the first time, the new census programme provides guidance on how to obtain and integrate data on fisheries (capture fisheries activities as aquaculture was already included) and on greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions from agricultural activities.
“The use of these guidelines by FAO member countries ensures that census results are harmonized and internationally comparable, and allows countries to benchmark their performance against others,” said FAO Chief Statistician, Pietro Gennari.
“They address the requirements of both developed and developing countries, and provide the foundation for the development of an integrated census and survey programme, for using innovative methods and tools for data collection, and ultimately, for making better informed strategic decisions,” he added.