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offices primarly supply extension services and perform various data collection and monitoring functions.
The ASA efforts were located in the direction of planning, formally referred to as the Direction of the Plan, Economic Analysis and Project Evaluation. The organagram of this bureau appears in Figure 2. This Direction is composed of the four divisions with a total of about 15 people training through USAID funding to the equivalent level of a U.S. Masters of Science in Agricultural Economics plus a cadre of people with various lower levels of college training. The available data base at the initiation of the sector analysis effort was "meager".
The portfolio of activities ascribed to the ASA effort included the design of an annual planning system and the development of an initial version of an agricultural sector analysis model, both to be located in the Division of Planning (Figure 2). The initial endowment of resources to undertake this activity included two counterpart Tunisians trained to the Masters of Science level in Agricultural Economics, a small cadre of technicians and the right to request data and other special services from the other Divisions in the bureau, in addition to the use of an IBM 360 computer.
While time and space do not allow the opportunity to discuss in
depth the nature of the planning process some of its important characteristics can be highlighted. The formal planning process in the Ministry of Agriculture includes the periodic development of a series of documents listing publicly supported projects, data describing the recent history of agricultural production by subsector and its structure, and some subsector