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Consultation on Horticulture Statistics
Harare, Zimbabwe, 19-22 July 2004
(Experts attending the Consultation)
BACKGROUND
The 1996 World Food Summit, through the Rome Declaration
on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action,
recognized the need to make concerted efforts to ensure food security
at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels.
Improving agricultural statistics in general helps planners to design
adequate agricultural development programmes to eliminate or reduce
food insecurity. Such programmes take into account the need for
individuals to have a balanced diet in their food consumption pattern.
In this regard, it has been recognized that fruits, vegetables and
minor crops in general provide the micronutrients required by the
bodies for people to lead a healthy life. Good statistics on all
these crops are thus needed. While reliable statistics are available
on major crops in many countries, the weaknesses of statistics on
horticulture are well known to data users and policy makers in agricultural
development, as well as to producers of agricultural statistics.
Details of the shortcomings are provided in some of the papers presented
at this Expert Consultation.
OBJECTIVE
The Expert Consultation was intended to review the
shortcomings and document existing experiences in view of preparing
a series of technical papers on methodology, possibly supported
by case studies on selected country practices and/or results from
controlled experiments. To this end, FAO had requested selected
specialists and experts to document the different aspects that might
be of importance for methodology and to benefit from their experiences
with (i) agronomic aspects of horticulture crops, (ii) assessments
of the performance of these crops, and (iii) horticulture production
estimates and forecasts.
The long-term objective of the current effort is to
provide guidelines and methodology suitable for developing countries
to make reasonable estimates of production of horticulture in general
and of fruits, vegetables and spices in particular. The meeting
focused on main horticulture crops that are significant for Africa:
tomatoes, salads, cabbages, mangoes, and citrus fruits. In this
context, the consultation objectives were to:
1. Review and discuss papers prepared in draft form
by each of the participating experts in order to document relevant
experiences/practices in the agronomy and the assessment of horticulture
production;
2. Discuss and identify key parameters for a system
capable of providing information and statistics on horticulture
crops;
3. Draw conclusions from the papers and discussions,
and make recommendations leading to a plan of action to derive pragmatic
method(s) for assessing the performance of horticulture crops and
obtaining estimates of their production, including field-testing
of methodologies.
The papers presented at this Expert Consultation constitute
useful resource material for future activities in the development
of methodologies for data collection of horticulture statistics.
The conclusions and recommendations will be
extremely valuable to FAO in the determination of actions to be
taken over the next few years covering different aspects of development
and experimentation of methodologies in view of preparing guidelines
on horticulture statistics. It is expected that different components
of such an action plan will come out from the contributions made
by the Experts attending this forum.
DOCUMENTS
The following documents are available (click on the
name to open):
- Final
report of the meeting (including List of Experts, Agenda,
List of Documents presented)
CONTACT
For all additional information, person to contact:
Mr. François N'Gopya
Statistician
Sub Regional Office for Southern and East Africa
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Harare, Zimbabwe
e-mail: Francois.Ngopya@fao.org
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