CSO need to come clean on inaccurate farm incomes

AS an independent body under the umbrella of the State, the Central Statistics Office is relied upon to produce reliable, unbiased and accurate information.

The credibility of the organisation stands or falls on the credibility of its published information, which is a vital input into the operation of many sectors of state and commercial businesses.

Allegations made during the past week that farm income figures issued by the CSO were calculated on the basis of out-of-date farm input costs have been seriously damaging to the Statistics Office. It is now incumbent on the CSO to provide more information on this issue. What was their source of farm input cost data? When was it last updated? What checks were made to ensure they used ‘real time’ costings for farm inputs in determining farm incomes?

The allegations have been seriously damaging to the future reliance of the public on published data from the CSO. Only a full clarification of the matter can restore public confidence.

It was not the first time questions have been raised over published statistics from the CSO. Clarification is still awaited on last year’s major discrepancy between CSO data on the size of the national cattle herd and published figures from the Department of Agriculture’s Cattle Movement Monitoring System (CMMS).

According to the CMMS, which should have an record of every animal in the national herd, the national cattle herd at December 2002 was slightly more than seven million head. But the CSO’s published figure at December 2002 was only just over 6.3m head.

A discrepancy of almost three-quarters of a million head of cattle is far too wide.

The jury is still out on this matter, and it remains unclear which is the more accurate figure; in other words, we do not know within 11% accuracy how many cattle we have in Ireland.

The CSO staff are very helpful and open to discussion, and very willing to take on board queries of their figures, and never attempt to cloud the methodologies they use.

Now they should be open to the questioning of their farm input costings, and of the sources of their input data, with the objective of restoring full reliability to their data.