Implementation
of the Fourth Iranian National Census of Agriculture
27
September-9 November 2014
The Iranian Census of Agriculture,
coincided with the 2010 round of agricultural censuses, is scheduled to be carried
out from 27 September to 9 November 2014. This is the fourth in a series of the
National Census of Agriculture. The previous censuses were undertaken in the
years 1988, 1993 and 2003. The Statistical Centre of Iran (SCI) is responsible
to take this Census in collaboration with other government agencies according
to the decree of the President of the I.R. Iran.
Ministry of the
Jihad-e-Agriculture as the main user of the statistics obtained in this Census
has a close collaboration with the Census working groups and operational staff and
supports the SCI in the Census implementation. According to the Law the
National Census of Agriculture is taken decennially.
Objectives,
definitions, classifications, standards and methodologies of this Census are
based on the Handbook” World Programme for the Census of Agriculture, 2010”
published by FAO.
In order to review the
probable problems and challenges of the Census and finding suitable solutions
for tackling them, the first phase of the pilot census of agriculture was taken
in 2012 in three provinces. The second phase of the pilot Agriculture Census
was carried out in 2013 in 31 rural agglomerations of 31 provinces of the
country and also in five selected cities.
The main method for
data collection in this Census is face-to-face interview with the agricultural
holders by trained enumerators through TABLET Device. For this purpose, first,
households, agricultural and livestock holders, authorized companies and public
institutions engaged in agricultural activities are recognized through place
listing and the reports of the local authorities and well-informed persons, and
then one or more questionnaires are filled out for every holder through direct
interview. The most important specification of this Census is the use of Tablet
device instead of paper forms, which is used for the first time in this
agriculture census. Indeed, using tablet instead of paper questionnaire is an
important innovation for increasing accuracy and precision of the collected
data and decreasing the time lag between the data collection and the results dissemination.
All editing operations are done by the enumerators themselves.
The questions which are
asked by the enumerators are: name and the address of the agricultural holders
including natural or legal persons, age, literacy, educational attainment and
national identity number of the holder, agricultural land use, name of
the holding products, land under annual crops including
wheat, barley and rice disaggregated by rainfed and irrigation, number of productive
trees and sapling of the permanent crops, number of light and heavy livestock by
gender, area of greenhouse, and type of the greenhouse activity. In this Census,
we
have focused on main census objective, namely frame constructing for sample
surveys which are scheduled to be undertaken in a few months after the Census.
They include livestock survey, permanent crops survey and temporary crops
survey which can satisfy the statistical needs of planners and
researchers.
After the Census, a report of the
collected data will be available to the planners, managers and researchers.