Beginning with 1950, the FAO World Programme for the Census of Agriculture (WCA) has been helping countries to carry out their national agricultural census at least once every decade using standard international concepts, definitions and methodology.
The programme assists countries by providing guidelines to generate internationally comparable figures on variable defining structure of agriculture, such as number and area of farms by size, number of livestock by type and age/sex classification, land tenure and land use, crops grown and agricultural inputs. FAO encourages countries to develop their programmes of censuses and surveys, keeping in view their priorities, practices and resource availability within the framework of a modular approach advocated in WCA 2010.
