Agriculture Census 2024, Non Household Listing Liberia

The LAC-2024 is an integrated census/survey modality program conducted in line with the World Programme for the Census of Agriculture (WCA) 2020 recommendations. The census also aligned with the objective of the 50x2030 Initiative to Close the Agricultural Data Gap. The LAC-2024 is expected to be followed by a series of annual modular agricultural surveys, including the 2024 Income, Labor, and Productivity (ILP) and the 2025 Production Methods and Environment (PME) surveys. As part of the census operations, information on non-household holdings was collected through cooperatives registered with the Cooperative Development Agency, concessions regulated by the National Bureau of Concessions (NBC), large-scale private farms, communal farms, and Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs).
The LAC-2024 also includes the Liberia Agriculture Census 2024 - Community Operations (https://microdata.fao.org/index.php/catalog/2710) and the Liberia Agriculture Census 2024 - Household Listing (https://microdata.fao.org/index.php/catalog/2711).

The Government of Liberia and its Development Partners recognized agriculture as a pivotal sector in fostering economic growth, reducing poverty, and achieving food security. Since the end of the second civil war, the Government, in collaboration with development partners, has made substantial investments to develop and expand the agricultural sector. Over the years, policymakers and data users in the agricultural sector have experienced significant challenges in obtaining the requisite data to monitor and evaluate these interventions and make informed decisions on new interventions. To address these challenges, the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LISGIS) and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) conducted several ad hoc agricultural surveys. While valuable, these surveys have often been limited in scope and unable to provide the comprehensive data needed for effective policymaking and planning. To support the sector more robustly, the government decided to undertake a comprehensive agricultural census.

The Liberia Agriculture Census 2024, the second agricultural census in Liberia since 1971 and the first to be conducted digitally, aimed to collect reliable structural data on various aspects of the agricultural sector.

The main objectives of the LAC-2024 were to:
·Reduce the existing data gap in Liberia's agricultural sector;
·Provide comprehensive data on the agriculture sector for policy formulation and evaluation of existing programs;
·Enable LISGIS to establish an agriculture master sampling frame for the conduct of future agricultural surveys and research;
·Identify the structural changes in the agriculture sector over time;
·Provide information on crop, livestock, poultry, and aquaculture activities;
·Determine the size, composition, practices, and related characteristics of Liberia's agricultural holdings;
·Generate disaggregated statistics on agriculture;
·Provide statistics for advocacy in Liberia's agricultural sector;
·Identify agricultural practices and constraints at the community level.

To achieve these objectives, the LAC-2024 was designed to collect structural data for household and non-household holdings, and at the community level. This data provided a wealth of information used to understand the state of agriculture in Liberia. This documentation presents detailed information on the methodology used to collect data at the non-household level and provides useful metadata on the anonymized dataset for non-household holdings.