April 16 2004, 00:00 APK-Inform

Round table discussion at the Conference "Grain Industry 2004" will deal with aerospace photography

Within the framework of the 3rd International Conference "Grain Industry-2004" our company will hold a round table discussion, dealing with the issues of timely and reliable estimation of agricultural crop collections in Ukraine.

Currently such estimations are usually based on the output information, coming directly from agricultural producers, which is received and processed by the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and the State Statistics Committee. Besides, on the basis of the data of research stations, the estimations are made by agricultural research institutions and weather centre. On certain reasons, the estimations, originated from different sources, quite frequently differ from each other rather greatly, and the official estimations are often criticised for being inadequate to the actual state of affairs.

The round table meeting, however, will aim not at comparing the actual and forecast data of different sources, but at discussing the possibilities of obtaining more reliable results, with lesser values of error. The subjects for discussion will be the existing and alternative methods and techniques of obtaining information about crops, with the special emphasis to advanced technologies, including space photography. This method of land and crops monitoring is being successfully used in some developed countries, providing farming specialists with sufficiently precise and complete information. Our country has competent professionals in this method of research and unique procedures of analysing the data from satellites, which can be applied already now for obtaining most valuable information about agricultural crops. The problems, however, are lack of coordinated activities of different specialists and underestimation of the issue on the state level. Therefore, we have invited to the meeting specialists from the Agrarian Policy Ministry, the State Statistics Committee, the weather centre, the Research Institute for Grain, the Geographical Research Institute, the Aerospace Agency and company "Dneprkosmos". We are also inviting professionals and analysts from major grain producing, grain trading and insurance companies and banks to take part in the discussion.