Vol. 429 No. 4
63 Mr. Cox asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Forestry if he can yet give the reason for the discrepancies that have arisen in determining the national cereal area which will be used as a basis in deciding the amount of set-aside under the EC Common Agricultural Policy reform proposals.
The national base area for the purpose of compensatory payments in the arable sector under the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy is the average of the areas under cereals, oilseeds, protein crops and set-aside for the three years 1989, 1990 and 1991. These data, as required by regulation, were based on estimates submitted by the Central Statistics Office, CSO, to the European Statistics Office, Eurostat.
I have been informed by the CSO that the estimates for the three years are based on benchmark data from the 1980 census of agriculture and subsequent annual postal surveys of farms to monitor year-to-year changes. However, the original estimate supplied by the CSO to Eurostat in respect of 1991 has been revised as a result of the 1991 agricultural census. This showed the base area for 1991 to be about 10 per cent lower than previously estimated.
This difference is attributed by the CSO to the fact that the original estimate was based on a series of samples linked back to the previous full census in 1980. Samples are subject to the usual sampling effors and, in addition, the use of linked samples can result in systematic biases accumulating over time. The bias effect can be particularly significant where activities are undergoing considerable change — such as happened in the case of cereals where the area sown fell by almost a third between 1980 and 1991.
