A Speech read on behalf of Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, the Minister of Agriculture, appealed to the chiefs, religious bodies and opinion leaders to assist in the publicity of credible data on the agriculture census for national development.

Dr Akoto said this on Monday in Accra at the close of a training workshop for 37 participants from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the Ministry of Agriculture with technical support from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

The nine-day training programme had been organised concurrently in all the regions to equip the trainees with the needed knowledge to enable them to effectively train field officers for the data collection exercise.

The training of the field officers will be done concurrently in all 216 districts across the country from April 3 to 12, 2018.

He said the main data collection for the census would be preceded by a listing exercise, during which the trained officers would visit all households and institutions to assign numbers to all structures and identify all household for the exercise.

“This will be followed by the actual exercise for two months three weeks where enumerators will visit all households and institutions engaged in the production of any type of food crop, livestock, aquaculture, in both inland and offshore water and any type of tree planting activity”.

Dr Akoto explained that the Census on Agriculture was a major national exercise that would collect the latest information from households and institutions on structure of agriculture in the country, vital to the rebasing of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

He said the Census would provide statistics on agriculture for policy makers to allocate public resources effectively and to better identify, prepare, implement and evaluate developmental projects to promote agriculture in the rural areas.

“The census would provide current information to help address environmental issues at the community level and provide relevant information for use by stakeholders for planning purposes, monitoring food security and livelihood requirements,” he added.

The Minister urged all and sundry especially respondents to cooperate fully with the field officers by providing all the required data in order to ensure a successful census of agriculture.

Mr David Kombat, the Director of Communication and Dissemination, GSS, urged the field officers not to record any fictitious information on the questionnaire and also not to engage in any other activity during the enumeration period.

Mr Kombat urged the field officers not to allow any unauthorised person to help them in their work, since the information collected was confidential and as well must not infringe on the cultural practices of the people.