According to data obtained in the first Eustat survey on the Information Society directed at the primary sector, with the collaboration of the Statistics Office of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, during 2003 ICT –Information and Communications Technology- equipment available to agricultural companies, mainly, and to a smaller extent to fishing enterprises in the A.C. of the Basque Country is still in the opening phase of introduction.

Primary sector establishments in the A.C. of the Basque Country, understanding this to be agricultural farms and boats used for fishing activity, due to excessive atomization (97.8% have 2 or fewer workers), do not generally reach a large enough size to warrant the use of these technologies.

Thus, and with the exception of the mobile phone where the percentage of use reaches 32.1%, in the rest of basic equipment, low penetration rates are obtained in comparison to other sectors, both in the use of computers (5.5%), and the availability of email (3.4%) or access to the Internet (3.6%). Companies that have a webpage, are practically inexistent, as only 0.4% are present on the web.

If this data is compared with the rest of the sectors in the Basque economy, we can see that the level of equipment in the primary sector is a long way from the rest.

In the primary sector, fishing companies have more ITC equipment than agricultural companies

In the primary sector, the levels obtained are very different if we separate agricultural businesses, which group together agriculture, livestock or forestry, from fishing companies, the latter obtaining much higher equipment percentages.

While in the agricultural sector the availability of this technology reaches very low percentages, ranging from 31.8% for mobile phones to 3.3% for email, with 5.1% for computers and 3.6% with Internet; in the fishing sector these percentages rise to 62.5% for mobile phones, 8.8% for email, 45.8% for computers and 6.8% for Internet.

Finally, if we take into consideration the size of farms and boats, a variable which introduces the primordial element of differentiation, smaller sizes (0-9 workers) have very low equipment levels, varying between 31.8% who have mobile phones and 3.3% who have email, with 5.1% owning computers and 3.5% with Internet access.

In comparison with the above, the average for large sizes -10 or more workers- already reaches quite higher levels, which according to the above order, range between 83.9% with mobile phones and 29.8% who have email, also reaching 75.4% for computers and 26.7% for companies with Internet access.