An Agriculture Survey to Determine the Number of Farmers and Their Produce

A countrywide survey is being conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture to gather information on the number of farmers actively partaking in the agro-productive sector, as well as the crops each grower produces.  The purpose, says government, is to enter the data into a system where it can be retrieved by end users, as well as ministry officials in monitoring trends and threats to the industry.  Minister of Agriculture, Godwin Hulse, urges the public to participate with enumerators who are visiting the farms.

Godwin Hulse

Godwin Hulse, Minister of Agriculture

“As we continue to push, and I want to make a plug for our census that we are carrying out, I think most people know that we are undertaking a national census of farmers and it is not really to get into people’s business, it is to know who is who, what they’re producing.  And again, to be able to ratchet up what we call this traceability.  In other words, if we are going to sell our products, one of the barriers to trade is always health.  “Oh, we don’t want anything from you because we don’t know and we have to protect our population.”  So that is a hurdle we have to overcome and the only way we can overcome is to be able to trace our products from the farm to the fork and to know who’s doing what and what they are producing.  The second aspect of that of course is also to be able to know what we have, how much corn we really produce and how much rice we really produce, how much vegetables we really produce and begin to be able to then target markets where there is demand for those products.  So we want to once again say to the public as our enumerators go around to collect this data and we’ll be doing it very scientifically, please cooperate.”

The survey runs over the course of a year.