Census of agriculture
[4][5][6][7][8] Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union provides a common definition for all its member countries.
[2] In terms of international comparability, some cross-country analytical studies on agricultural sectors have been carried out using census data.
[5][6][7][8] Eurostat provides a common definition of the statistical unit for all European Union member countries.
Units engaged in forestry and fisheries are not covered unless they also had some crop or livestock production activities.
Some countries such as Argentina,[14] Colombia,[15] Chile,[16] Brazil,[17] Japan,[18] Korea[19] and New Zealand[20] include forestry within the scope of their census of agriculture.
Other countries such as Colombia,[15] Brazil,[17] Republic of Korea,[19] the Philippines[21] and Thailand[22] include fisheries.
[2][23] The first censuses of agriculture were carried out in Norway (1835),[23] USA (1840),[23] Belgium (1846), Uruguay (1852), the UK (1866), Argentina (1888), Hungary (1895), Canada (1896) and Bulgaria (1897).
The first Programme for the World Census of Agriculture (WCA) was developed for the years 1929-1930 and implemented in about 60 countries.
Following its creation in 1945, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) succeeded the IIA and took over the task of organizing the World Programme for the Census of Agriculture (WCA) starting from the 1950 round and continued with successive decennial Programmes.
[27] The current WCA 2020 is the tenth decennial international Census of Agriculture Programme and covers the period 2016–2025.
[2] In the 1920s, governments from many countries agreed to promote a coordinated implementation of censuses of agriculture around the world on a uniform basis.
[23] In each decennial WCA, FAO supports member countries to carry out their national agricultural censuses through the development and dissemination of methodological and practical guidelines, and technical assistance.
[29][24][23] The census of agriculture is one of the largest and most costly national statistical operations and takes several years to implement from planning to dissemination of results.
Some publications discuss approaches conducive to improving the cost efficiency of the census of agriculture while ensuring data quality, and present some country experiences.
Thus, countries carefully schedule census activities to ensure that crop and livestock data are collected at the right time.
A delay in census activities may be critical and can result in a full year postponement of the enumeration if the agricultural season is missed.
Earlier structural data on agriculture were provided through population censuses (PCs), which were conducted in 1950, 1971 and 1982, and included a section with agriculture-related items.
The second one was carried out in 1961, while the third was conducted in 1968/1969, and represented the first participation of Jamaica in the FAO World Census of Agriculture Programme.
[24] The first nationwide census of agriculture in Panama was conducted in 1950 through complete enumeration; the second one was carried out in 1961, on a sample basis.
Later, the timing was adjusted, such that the census of agriculture is conducted on the basis of a five-year data collection cycle, covering the years ending in 2 and 7.
The Republic of Korea participated in the decennial WCA, with censuses of agriculture being conducted every ten years from 1960 to 1990 (in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990).
Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, provides information for all its member countries.
The first census of agriculture of Latvia was carried out in compliance with the requirements of EU legislation took place in 2001, followed by FSSs conducted (on sample basis) in 2003, 2005 and 2007.
[24] The first exhaustive, systematic and organized statistical data collection on the agriculture of Portugal took place in 1934, with the "General inventory of livestock and poultry", which was later repeated in 1940 and 1972.
The first General Census on Agriculture was carried out in 1989, exhaustively and simultaneously across all regions of the country, and was harmonized with the EU.
Until 2001, Sweden compiled FSSs annually, switching every year between EU and national legislation.
Switzerland has a yearly census for the main agricultural topics like farmland, livestock and labour force.
[24] A census of agriculture is conducted in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) since 1866.
The current strategy envisages a five-year-interval census with sample surveys in inter-censal years.
[24] The fourth census was underway in early 2023 but was put on hold in March 2023 due to the two Category 4 Cyclones Judy and Kevin that made landfall over the country.
