The Integrated Agriculture Census (IAC) project is a multi-donor project to improve agricultural information to help develop evidence based policy which will deliver better food security and income from agriculture for the people of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM).

A national census of agriculture has not been carried out in FSM since 1969 which means that accurate, consistent, relevant, and overall timely agricultural data is very limited. This has led difficulties in designing appropriate policies and making meaningful plans for the agricultural sector. The outcomes of the IAC is planned to address this issue.

A workshop to train the State Trainers for the 2016 FSM IAC took place in May. The workshop prepared State enumerators on the IAC materials to count natural resource information across the FSM. State agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock agencies and representatives from research extension and statistics field offices along with supporting staff from the FSM Department of Resources and Development participated in this workshop.

“Census is the mother of all information gathering,” said Statistics Assistant Secretary Mathew Chigiyal. “This effort requires teamwork between National and State line agencies and within each State amongst the resource agencies because the success of this Census depends on this teamwork and each team is dependent on each other for a successful outcome.”

The workshop included presentations from both national government support staff and state resource management experts in the field in which they gave an overview on team preparation, materials, support tools and lessons learned from the pre-testing trial to assist the 2016 FSM IAC State Trainers. 

“I am one of those from Agriculture who insisted on this Census and this training gives me the confidence to learn from our pre-testing experience and carrying out the Census in July,” said Adelino Lorens, Pohnpei State Agriculture Division Chief.

 “This workshop allows for a face-to-face time in coordinating with the Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei and Yap State Managers to develop a detailed training plan for our supervisors and enumerators,” said Marlyter Silbanuz, FSMR&D’s Agriculture Program Manager.

Agriculture, forestry, fisheries, livestock, research extension and statistics representatives from the States of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap attended the workshop facilitated by the FSMR&D’s staff from the Division of Statistics and Division of Resource Management and Development), with support from the FSM National Congress, FAO, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), India Government and US Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

This multi-donor project is to support the 2016 FSM Integrated Agriculture Census with data collection of agriculture (crops and livestock), forestry and fisheries information from all households in the four FSM States.  This information will be compiled at State and National levels to guide Government line agencies and policy-makers on developing sectoral interventions and development partners on technical assistance projects/programs.

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