[2][3] Governments from many countries agreed to promote a coordinated implementation of censuses of agriculture around the world on a basis as uniform as possible.
[1] In each decennial WCA, FAO supports member countries to carry out their national censuses of agriculture through the development and dissemination of up-to-date international standards, concepts, definitions and methodologies as well as technical assistance.
However, many countries found it difficult to conduct the census using a long questionnaire given the limited human and technological resources.
[5][6] The WCA 1950, the first programme developed by FAO, brought forward the idea of collecting data on the structural characteristics of agriculture as the primary purpose of the census.
The 1950 programme also gave increased attention to the definitions of census items and the tabulation of internationally comparable results.
The programme discussed the use of sampling in pilot censuses and pre-testing surveys, in PES, in quality checks during data processing, in tabulation of results, etc.
Third, that concepts, definitions and methods should be harmonized with other related statistical systems and operations to ensure comparability and compatibility.
[5] The WCA 1990 encouraged countries to develop and implement the census of agriculture according to their national economic and statistical capabilities and requirements.
The programme also introduced the issue of the role of women in agriculture and the presentation of census results disaggregated by sex.
Another innovation was the option to include aquaculture holdings (introduced in supplementary guidelines, SDS 5b) and the marking of some items as having environmental implications.
The programme introduced a community survey to be conducted in parallel with the census and for obtaining data on common infrastructure issues affecting farmers.
The WCA 2020 improved the approach for assessing the distribution of managerial decisions in the holding, useful for the collection of sex-disaggregated data.
Two more features of the WCA 2020 was, first, an increased emphasis on the use of information technology in data collection, processing and dissemination (e.g. CAPI, CAWI, the use of interactive online outputs and access to anonymised micro-data).
[11] The WCA 2020 was complemented by Operational guidelines,[12] which provided practical guidance on the main stages involved in the preparation and implementation of the census of agriculture.
The repository includes a short country profile of the methodology, coverage and main results,[13] while a global review of agricultural censuses was published in early 2021.
[17] Starting with the WCA 2010 round (2005–2015), some countries provided access to anonymized census microdata (e.g. Armenia Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cook Islands, Estonia, France, Indonesia, Italy, Rep. of Korea, Lao DPR, Nepal, Namibia, the Netherlands, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Poland, Portugal, the Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Tanzania, Uruguay, USA and Viet Nam).
The Food and Agriculture Microdata (FAM) Catalogue had links to ten census datasets available in countries’ websites as of March 2020.
Thus, countries carefully schedule census activities to ensure that crop and livestock data are collected at the right time.
In some countries, lockdown measures resulted in a full year postponement of the census data collection as the agricultural season was missed.