The Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture and the Market Information of the Americas (MIOA) held a workshop on the Agricultural Marketing Information Database of Americas from the 21st – 22nd of August 2017
The workshop was geared towards training the necessary personnel on how to operate and implement the new online data collection system.
The workshop was a follow-up to a training and assessment of the system done in 2014.
“The Market Information Organization of the Americas (MIOA) is a cooperation network comprised of government institutions or those institutions so delegated by the government, whose principal functions and aims is the collection, process, analysis and dissemination of information relative to markets and agricultural commodities.
MIOA’s main purpose is to promote markets’ importance and transparency by means of a timely and systematic information exchange.”
The main facilitator for the workshop was Dr. James French, Principal Officer for Competitiveness and Sustainability of Agricultural Chains, IICA and a member of the Technical Secretariat for the MIOA.
Dr. French provided a background on the MIOA and conducted sessions with System Administrators on the MIOA database with a specific focus on the entry of market location and zones, inserting markets, commodities, varieties, origin, sales units and the links of these commodities to a specific market.
Data Collectors were also taught how to enter the prices of commodities in various markets to the system while market researchers were taught how to create reports on commodities from the system.