From:TheBahamasWeekly.com
Strengthening of Agriculture Through Update of Statistical Processes
By Stirling Strachan
Jun 21, 2019 - 1:49:40 PM
Nassau, The Bahamas -- Minister of Agriculture and Marine Resources the Hon. Michael Pintard announced new initiatives the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources would embark on during his contribution to the 2019-2020 Budget. The Agriculture sector is at a crossroads, he said, since the last census took place in 1994. Therefore a strengthening exercise will involve three distinct phases: institutional, operational and training.
The aim of the Institutional Phase is to align agriculture in the on-going efforts to develop the National Statistics System (NSS), which is being led by the Department of Statistics. The Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources and the Department of Agriculture have been actively involved in this process.
The strategy for the development of agricultural statistics was presented at the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS) workshop held in February 2019. Agriculture and Marine Resources have also participated in the Economic and Environmental Sector Specific Committees and the Technical Working Committee to ensure that there is coordination between Agriculture and Marine Resources and the NSDS.
During the Operational Phase activities will be undertaken to fill the lack of agricultural current information by deepening and increasing the collection and compilation of agriculture data and improving methodologies. In this regard, efforts are being made to link the farmer registration with data collection systems. One of the outputs of this initiative will be the conduct of a survey of key agricultural producers in July/August of this year to project crop production volumes for the upcoming season.
Concurrent to the Institutional and Operational phases, there will be a Training Phase that aims to strengthen capacities, abilities and professional skills of human resources in the production of agricultural statistics based on the core statistical values of accuracy, relevance, timeliness, comparability, availability and accessibility.
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