The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) together with the International Center for Agribusiness Research and Education (ICARE) Foundation organized a final workshop in November 2021 to sum up the results of the implementation of FAO’s Agricultural Integrated Survey programme (AGRISurvey) in Armenia. The online workshop was moderated by ICARE Foundation Research Group.

The workshop was an opportunity to take stock of the main achievements of the last three years, since the start of the implementation of AGRISurvey in Armenia.

Thanks to the application of innovative methodologies for conducting sample surveys, and the great cooperation between FAO, the Statistical Committee of the Republic of Armenia (Armstat) and the ICARE Foundation, the importance of agricultural statistics started to be increasingly recognized in Armenia, where the first Agricultural Census took place as recently as 2014.

In its three-year implementation phase, AGRISurvey supported the preparation and implementation of pilot surveys in four regions of the country.

In 2020, agricultural statistics data were collected in those four regions, using the core and economic modules of AGRIS methodology, gathering the data needed to compute SDG Indicators 2.3.1 on labour productivity of small agricultural producers and 2.3.2 on income of small agricultural producers.

The programme provided trainings and capacity development activities, as well as support in the preparation of initial, quarterly and annual questionnaires and manuals. The implementation of AGRISurvey resulted in the development of capacity of national statisticians in collecting, analyzing and disseminating agricultural statistics data, as confirmed by the evaluations of the direct beneficiaries of the project, the head of the Armstat agricultural statistics department and the heads of the four regional Armstat directorates.  

In addition to this, the programme provided the enumerators and supervisors in the four regions with tablets, through which they have been able to fill in comprehensive questionnaires in a relatively reasonable amount of time.

The final workshop was attended by officials from FAO headquarters  and Armenian offices, representatives of the headquarters and regional structures of Armstat, enumerators and supervisors involved in the field data collection, the Ministry of Economy – department on agriculture, the National Agrarian University of Armenia and other interested organizations and experts in the sector.

Vahan Amirkhanyan (FAO Armenia) and Anahit Safyan, Member of the Council of Armstat, in their opening remarks, underlined that the AGRISurvey project has been an important milestone in the development of the agricultural statistics in Armenia.

The final workshop provided the opportunity to discuss about the main results, challenges and lessons learned throughout the years of implementation. One of the lessons learned was that the farms involved in the AGRISurvey project were not accustomed to in-house face-to face interviews and, perhaps for the first time, understood the importance of such data collection method.

Finally, the workshop highlighted the need to continuing producing timely and reliable statistics for agricultural development. The data generated through the implementation of AGRISurvey have been unprecedentedly comprehensive. Already the two modules implemented in 2020 provided opportunities for rich analysis, including by main farm types.  

News articles about AGRISurvey final workshop in Armenia, have been published on November 26^th in two popular Armenian media: Lragir.am and Hraparak.am and on the website of the Armenian National Agrarian University.