FAO's new vegetable oils search engine

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently launched its new statistical information system on global agricultural production, FAOStat. It is the first revision of the system in more than a decade. “We have redeveloped FAOStat to better serve our users and give them more time for analysis,” the Director of FAO’s Statistics Division, Haluk Kasnakoglu said. “The new FAOSTAT consists of an integrated core database and satellite databases feeding and supporting it. The thematic databases cover areas such as agricultural production, consumption, trade, prices and resources,” Mr Kasnakoglu also said.

The new FAOSTAT is already available from the FAO website. It comes with complete global coverage, cross-domain integration, a fully refined user interface and increased data transparency. A new national version, CountrySTAT, has been under development and is being released in a score of pilot countries. It will offer a two-way bridge between national and international statistics on food and agriculture.

10 million records downloaded every day
FAOStat is currently the world’s largest and most comprehensive statistical database on food and agriculture. It contains over 1 billion data points, 40 million of which are updated annually. The current core of FAOSTAT contains a full matrix of integrated and compatible statistics coverage of 200 countries, a period of 15 years, and more than 200 primary products and input items. The FAOSTAT site receives over 10 000 daily hits and 10 million records are downloaded every day. “This is a twenty-fold increase just over the last 5 years,” Mr Kasnakoglu indicated.

Oils, oil seeds, cakes, meals and protein
We use the FAOStat database often to learn more about the bioenergy potential of a country. One series of data we look at is that of vegetable oil production, to get an overview of the biodiesel production potential (for example, we are analysing the differences in palm oil yields between a highly productive country like Malaysia, and Central African countries; we see that African plantations yield much lower, because of several reasons (bad maintenance, low fertilizer use, low press yields, and so on. This leads us to conclude that old plantations might be replanted with new high-yielding palms, which would boost output. This potential in Africa is large. So without expanding the hectarage, and without new deforestatio, old plantations can be replanted and yield much more).

In the earlier version of the statistical system, it was difficult to compile one's own databases on this specific topic because data were fused in combined records. In the new version, an entirely dedicated section on oils has been included, where different production indicators are seperately presented. The "Oilseeds, Oils, Fats, Cakes and Meals" database lists yearly maintained entries on gross exports and imports, on indigenous exports, and on production, for the following oils and byproducts (this is a non-exhaustive list): castor beans (oil), coconut (oil, copra meal, copra protein), cotton seeds (cottonseed oil, meal, protein), groundnuts (oil, cake, protein), hempseed (oil), linseed (oil, cake, protein), maize (oil), mustard seed (oil, meal), olive (oil), palm fruits (oil), palm kernels (oil, cake, protein), poppy seed (oil), rapeseed (oil, cake, protein), rice bran (oil), safflower (oil, cake, protein)sesame (oil, cake, protein), soya (oil, cake, proteine), stillingia (oil), sunflower (oil, cake, protein) and tung (oil). Added to this are specialty oils and extracts, plus data on animal oils, meals and cakes. The data are available for all countries, and start from the year 1993. A subsection is devoted to oil seeds with records on crush capacity and rates, imports/exports and production [entry ends here].
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