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The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) is set conduct to an Agricultural Census in 2011.
The move forms part of government’s effort to use the agricultural sector to grow the Ghanaian economy. Dr Grace Bediako, Government Statistician, has disclosed.
The exercise, she noted, will take a cue from Population and Housing Census expected to be carried out next year and a re-engineering of the annual agricultural surveys.
We will also be considering the institutional arrangements governing the production and the dissemination of statistics system-wide and will be reviewing the framework for agricultural and allied statistics as part of this programme for institutional reforms,” she explained.
The agricultural sector contributed 5.14 percent of the total GDP of the country and grew at 7.3 percent last year, but economists believe the sector has more for improvement if the necessary attention is given by the government.
The growth of the country stood at 6.1 percent in 2007 but before then, the economy had grew at 5.9 and 6.0 percent in 2003 and 5.6 percent in 2004.
The Government Statistician added that as a precursor to these proposed reforms, her outfit would draw lessons from the experience gained from their work on CountrySTAT programme, which seeks to promote within country, interagency and stakeholder collaboration in the production and dissemination of agricultural statistics, and among countries, south-south cooperation.
The CountrySTAT programme is an integrated system for national food and agricultural statistics and is being championed by Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). The system harmonizes and integrates data on food and agriculture coming from different sources.
Meanwhile, a comprehensive database of farmers, Farmer-bases Organizations (Fobs), other agricultural producers, traders and processors to provide the basis and mechanism to target policies, interventions and outreach programmes is underway.
Kwesi Ahwoi, the Minister for Food and Agriculture who revealed this at the 21st session of the Africa Commission on Agricultural Statistics (AFAS) that ended on Friday, said the exercise wad currently ongoing and will need addition resources to validate the first generation of data.
"I have given the agric extension officers up to the end of this year to get data on every farmer that they handle across the country. In addition to this there was the need for coordination of data collection efforts within countries," said Mr Ahwoi.
The 21st session hosted by Ghana was attended by almost all African countries, which are members of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The African Union Commission, African Development Bank, took part in the three day workshop.
Source: Business Guide, Monday November 2, 2009, Page 10.
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