In 2002, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) registered 248.5 thousand farms for agricultural use, covering 533.4 thousand hectares. The region’s total agricultural land area comprised 25.9 percent of the region’s total land area. As the number of farms increased by 9.2 percent from 227.6 thousand farms in 1991, the farm size however, decreased from 2.5 hectares per farm to 2.1 hectares per farm.

The National Statistics Office (NSO) deployed over 25,000 personnel in the first lap of the nationwide census-taking of the Censuses of Agriculture and Fisheries 2002 (CAF 2002), which began March 3. Taken every ten years, CAF is a large-scale government operation that will gather data and generate the latest inventory of statistics on agriculture and fisheries.