Field data collection for Sri Lanka’s agricultural census will begin next month, the Department of Census and Statistics has said, NewsFirst reported.
The agricultural census is conducted as a component of the economic census, which is carried out once every ten years.
Director General Shamali Karunarathne said training is currently under way for the officials who will carry out the data collection.
Why a decadal count matters
An agricultural census is a full enumeration rather than a sample survey. It is the exercise that establishes how many agricultural holdings exist, their size distribution, what is grown on them, how land is tenured, and how many people work the land — the baseline that sample surveys between censuses are then weighted against.
For a sector that accounts for a large share of employment and is the subject of continuing policy intervention — fertiliser support, paddy purchasing by the Paddy Marketing Board, and crop subsidies among them — the count determines what the state believes it is intervening in. Estimates of yields, food security and rural incomes all rest on it.
Still to be announced
The Department has not published the start date within October, the duration of fieldwork, the reference period being measured, the number of enumerators being trained, or when results will be released. Nor has it said whether collection is digital or paper-based.
The Department of Census and Statistics is the same agency that compiles the Colombo Consumer Price Index and the National Consumer Price Index, whose recent releases put Colombo inflation at 8% and national inflation at 7.2% in July. No other verified newsroom had reported the announcement at the time of writing.
