The emergence of the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) was spurred by government efforts to improve the agricultural database in the country. In the past, the agricultural data system suffered from significant gaps, some duplications and occasional issues on the relevance of some data series to users. The major reasons were: (1) the agency responsible for agricultural statistics, the then Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAEcon), was originally set up as a user rather than a producer of statistics, (2) the development of agriculture statistics received very low priority in the sharing of limited resources allotted to the statistical system, and (3) the widespread duplication of statis