Page 186 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS 208 Johan S. et al.

Agricultural Census 2020 – How to reduce costs
and burden? The European Statistical System
approach
Johan Selenius, Christine Wirtz, Denisa Florescu, Andreas C. Lazar
European Commission – Eurostat

Abstract
Information on the structure of agriculture is necessary to understand the risks
for ensuring food security, the trends in food production as well as the impacts
on rural life and the environment. At global level, the FAO advises all countries
to carry out an agricultural census every 10 years to have a full picture of the
situation. The European Union (EU) considers it necessary to collect data on
farm structure for the common agricultural policy (CAP) and various other
policies, often related to environmental aspects, but at more frequent
intervals.
This paper presents the technical and methodological aspects of the newly
modified system for the European agricultural censuses. Under the new set-
up, EU countries can reduce the burden on respondents while increasing the
availability of statistics for the census 2020. A set of 184 core variables are
collected as a census for all farms above common physical thresholds in all
countries with the target of covering 98% of each country's agriculture. For
sub-samples of farms, the core variables will be supplemented with variables
grouped in three modules on ‘Labour force and other gainful activities’, ‘Rural
development’ and ‘Animal housing and manure management’. The system
allows countries to use multiple sources and methods – such as surveys,
administrative data or innovative methods and approaches – to obtain data
subject to meeting pre-defined quality requirements. The efforts of the
European Statistical System (ESS) to allow countries who do not meet the
census’s 98% agricultural area and livestock coverage requirements to
conduct a sample data collection on the smallest farms and further ways of
reducing costs and burden will be discussed.

Keywords
Modular approach; Geo-referencing; Eurostat

1. Introduction
Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, publishes EU-wide agricultural statistics
on the structure of farms and other operators in the agricultural sector,
agricultural production, production factors, and agrimonetary data. Economic
accounts for agriculture provide an overall view of the agricultural sector. The
main aim is to support decision-making and policy design, implementation,

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