‘Zambia should improve agro stats’
By Business Reporter -
THE Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said Zambia needs to
improve statistical information on agricultural production and food
consumption to help optimise the production capacity of farmers.
FAO has observed that making data available on national food and
agricultural statistics in areas that produce particular foods would significantly improve the agriculture sector in Zambia and many
African countries.
To overcome this challenge, FAO has undertaken a programme to
create a database for all agriculture-related statistics called
CountrySTAT which would feed into the global system called FAOSTAT
covering more than 200 countries and territories.
FAO CountrySTAT project officer Julia Stone said the programme would
help the farmers and dealers in agricultural produce have
information pertaining to agricultural produce.
Ms Stone said the data would help people locate areas where the
produce would be found, especially that it would be collecting all the
data from all the food and agricultural institutions in the country
and carrying agricultural surveys.
“There are instances where there is a shortage of certain crops like
soya beans which can be found in the countryside, but under the
countrySTAT programme all the information will be provided,” she said.
Stakeholders in the agriculture sector contended that there was little
information on the availability of some of the agricultural produce in
the country, especially among small-scale farmers.
Speaking in Lusaka at the Agriculture Consultative Forum
stakeholders meeting, Ms Stone said the programme would also be
involved in the provision of quality and coordinated national
statistics by merging all the data from different food balance sheets
and food security analyses.
Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock development principal economist,
Dingiswayo Banda observed that there was lack of information in the
agriculture sector, which he said would be addressed by working in
collaboration with CountrySTAT.
“The project has links to other information systems including
FAOSTAT, Regional STAT and the global information and early warning
system work station which will help Zambia significantly,” he said.
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