68. The organiser of this session was Mr. A. D. Marshall, Senior Officer, FAO Statistics Division; and the discussant was Mr. Feng Nailin, Director-General, Department of International Co-operation and of FASC.

 

69. Three papers were presented:

(i)“Comparison of Chinese Agricultural Census Data with Other Countries” (Mr. álvaro González-Villalobos);

(ii)“Studies on China’s Agricultural Conditions by International Comparison” (Zheng Zexiang);

(iii)“The Use of Agricultural Census Results for the Construction of the National Agricultural Economic Accounts (EAA)”  (A. Lindner).

 

70. The first paper focused on the difficulties in making international comparisons of census data due to differences in concepts and definitions used at the national level. Despite these difficulties, FAO publishes comparisons among countries. Referring to the published comparisons for the 1990 World Census of Agriculture round, the presenter showed the contribution to the coverage of this analysis of the Chinese census data. For instance, in terms of population, the Chinese census increased the coverage of the comparative analysis by some 50%. In terms of agricultural holdings, the coverage increased by over 100%, because of the small size of the agricultural holdings in PRC.

 

71. The second paper focused on international comparisons over time as they relate to agricultural conditions; namely, agricultural production resources (labor force, cultivated land and water resources), agricultural infrastructure (irrigation and transportation), capital input (investment and fiscal expenditure), scientific research (scientific and technical inputs and development of agricultural technologies), mechanization (accumulation of farm machinery and technology of farm machinery), and output. The paper also suggested measures and policies for agriculture development.

 

72. The third paper focused on the use of the census data for the improvement of the national accounts in PRC and, in particular, the EAA. It was explained that understanding the economics of Chinese agriculture required a valuation of economic activities and transactions, and this was the key to responding to a variety of economic and policy questions. The paper showed that the elaboration of the EAA necessitated the use of a variety of data sources and also presented challenges with respect to data integration. The presentation stressed the importance of food balance sheets in the analysis, and highlighted the importance of many items of data collected in the census such as crop areas, livestock numbers and production factors.

 

73. Questions were raised in reference to the scope of the census and the exclusion of production data in many national census programs, possibly due to the need to limit the size of census questionnaires. It was suggested that the FAO guidelines should be revised because holders know the production figures better than the area of land used. Also, the data gaps and weaknesses that have to be faced by the national accounts statisticians in preparing the EAA were mentioned. The issue of the location of this work in terms of institutional setting also arose. Also, the need to modify the definitions of the operational units and of the unit of measurement was stressed.