A NATIONAL agricultural census will be conducted during the first half of 2019 after a hiatus of 65 years.
Agriculture Sector Development Unit (ASDU) Director George Jervis said the census will be funded by the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB).

“Under the IDB loan, we have US$4M. We are also pursuing with the IDB an additional US$1.5M as a technical cooperation grant to help with preparatory work.
“We were also able to obtain a commitment from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) for an additional US$$1.3M for the countrywide exercise,” Jarvis said.

The competent authority for such a census is the Bureau of Statistics, but the ministry has been considering the employment of other players such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) or the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA) to carry out this exercise.

The census will involve a complete count of Guyanese farms and farmers with even the smallest plots of land with vegetables, fruit and livestock.
Jervis said hopefully, a pilot for the census should be finished by December and enumerators should be in the field to complete the census by the first half of 2019.

An agri census is a source of uniform, comprehensive and impartial agricultural data in any country and the information gleaned is used to make decisions that will help shape the future of agriculture.

The last agricultural census held in Guyana was done in the then British Guiana in 1953.
The census data will be used by all those who serve farmers and rural communities such as the national and local governments, agribusinesses, technical support agencies and many others.

Business and cooperatives use the facts and figures to determine the locations of facilities that will serve agricultural producers.

Community planners and local governments use the information to target needed programmes and services to rural residents; legislators use the numbers from the census when shaping farm policies and programmes, while farmers can use the data to help make informed decisions about the future of their own operations.

Stakeholders have commended the decision, noting that it can help them gauge the country’s agricultural capacity, understand actual ongoing front-line production activity, understand the trends which are occurring and all critical data which can point the way forward in enhancing agricultural development.