STANDING COMMITTEE'S CONCERN FOR AGRICULTURAL CENSUS

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia /MONTSAME/ The parliamentary Standing committee on economy decided on Tuesday whether to discuss a draft law on amending the law on Statistics. In the draft law it has been reflected to include in the law a clause about running an agricultural census every 10 years and routine census or research every five years. For the time being, the census, run by the National statistical office in livestock and domestic animal on December 7-17 every year, only collect information about the livestock, one of many parts of the agricultural sphere, and is not able to tell about livestock productivity, food safety, fishery, forestry, hunting and farming. The meeting also took into consideration another fact. The UN's Food agriculture organization /FAO/ worked out a consolidated programme on running agricultural census in 2006-2015 and expects now that it will be run in over 100 countries during 2011. Since the time coverage of the census is a year, or 12 months due to seasonal manner of the agricultural production, the FAO supposes that it would be right for the member-countries to run this census. For Mongolia, this period might become a preparation stage for the agricultural census. "In this case we can reveal not only livestock and domestic animals indicators, but also land use, ownership, soil erosion, afforestation, protection, utilization and irrigation figures," said the gathered and decided to have parliament consider the draft.

B.Oyundelger