FAO Country Profiles

The FAO Country Profiles is a multilingual[1] web portal that repackages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) information archive on its global activities in agriculture and food security in a single area and catalogues it exclusively by country and thematic areas.

FAO Country Profiles
Developer(s)FAO of the United Nations
Stable release
2012 / 2001
TypeKnowledge Representation, Ontology Editor
WebsiteFAO Country Profiles

The organization aims to offer decision-makers, researchers and project formulators around the world a fast and reliable way to access country-specific information on national food security situations without the need to search individual databases and systems. It aids FAO's database by providing a simple interface containing interactive maps and charts.[2]

Background

FAO has highlighted information and Knowledge sharing as priority areas in fighting hunger and achieving food security.[3] In this context, FAO identified countries could improve their national programs on agriculture and food security if they accessed FAO's information through a cross-sectoral (or interdisciplinary) country-based approach.[4][5] Despite the existence of a large number of country-based information systems in FAO, the information managed by the various systems lacked integration. Information was generated and used in a circumscribed manner and tailored to a specific system, department or sector.

The FAO Country Profiles portal, initially called FAO Country Profiles and Mapping Information System, was launched in 2002 responding to the Organization's need to provide FAO website users with an easy-to-use mechanism to find FAO country-specific information without the need to search individual FAO web sites, databases or systems. The system was designed to integrate analytical and multilingual information with thematic databases and digital map repositories and to facilitate access to information on multiple factors contributing to national food insecurity.

Since its launch, the system has grown by incorporating more and more data sources. This was achieved thanks to a corporate effort to reduce information silos and the adoption of international standards for country-based information management throughout the Organization.

Country Profiles

The methodology behind the FAO Country Profiles is rather simple; it links, reuses and repackages data and information from most relevant existing FAO databases and systems.

The FAO Country Profiles covers current FAO Members and Associated Nations.[6] Once a country is selected, the portal presents to the user documents, news feeds, statistical data, project details and maps from relevant FAO databases and systems for the selected country and categorized according to thematic areas.

The thematic areas are grouped in two categories:

Data sources

Country pages provide access to or integrate the following thematic profiles and systems.[8]

FAO data sources

Partnerships data sources
  • AgriFeeds: AgriFeeds is a service that allows users to search and filter news and events from several agricultural information sources. It harvests, stores and re-aggregates news and events from feeds published by agricultural organizations and information services.
  • International Portal on Food Safety, Animal & Plant Health (IPFSAPH): IPFSAPH facilitates trade in food and agriculture by providing a single access point to authorized official international and national information across the sectors of food safety, animal and plant health. It has been developed by FAO in association with the organizations responsible for international standard setting in sanitary and phytosanitary matters.

Non-FAO data sources
  • Earthtrends, World Resources Institute: EarthTrends is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape the world. The Earthtrends country profiles present environmental information about key variables for different topic areas.
  • International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD): Rural poverty country profiles are produced by IFAD.

Standards
Geopolitical information section in the FAO Country Profiles.

There are various international standards and coding systems to manage country information. Historically, systems dealing with different types of data used different coding systems that were tailored to specific data type requirements. For example, statistical systems in the United Nations commonly use the M-49 classification and pigmentation[9] (also known as UN code) or the FAOSTAT area classification;[10] mapping systems could use geographic coordinates or GAUL codes; textual systems (document repositories or web sites) could use ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 or AGROVOC keywords; etc.

The FAO Country Profiles provide access to systems managing statistics, documents, maps, news feeds, etc., therefore one of its key aspects to succeed was the mapping of all these country codes.

For this purpose a geopolitical ontology was developed.[11] This ontology, among other features, maps ISO2, ISO3, AGROVOC, FAOSTAT, FAOTERM, GAUL, UN, and UNDP codes for all countries.

Global Resources

Besides the profiles for each country the portal also provides access to other important global resources, such as:

Low-Income Food Deficit Countries (LIFDC)

The FAO Country Profiles keeps updated for the public the list of LIFDC countries. This list is revised every year according to the methodology explained below. The new list of the LIFDC,[12] stands at 62 countries, four less than in the (2012) list. These are: Georgia, Syrian Arab Republic, Timor-Leste, Republic of Moldova. While Moldova graduated from the list on the basis of net food-exporter criterion, the other graduated based on income criterion.

LIFDC methodology

The classification of a country as low-income food-deficit used for analytical purposes by FAO is traditionally determined by three criteria:

  1. A country should have a per capita income below the "historical" ceiling used by the World Bank[13] to determine eligibility for IDA assistance and for 20-year IBRD terms, applied to countries included in the World Bank categories I and II.[14] For instance, the historical ceiling of per capita gross national income (GNI) for 2006, based on the World Bank Atlas method,[15] was US$1,735, i.e. higher than the level established for 2005 ($1,675).
  2. The net food trade[16] position of a country averaged over the preceding three years for which statistics are available, in this case from 2003 to 2005. Trade volumes for a broad basket of basic foodstuffs (cereals, roots and tubers, pulses, oilseeds and oils other than tree crop oils, meat and dairy products) are converted and aggregated by the calorie content of individual commodities.
  3. A self-exclusion criterion is applied when countries that meet the above two criteria specifically request FAO to be excluded from the LIFDC category.

In order to avoid countries changing their LIFDC status too frequently - typically due to short-term, exogenous shocks - an additional factor was introduced in 2001. This factor, called "persistence of position", would postpone the "exit" of a LIFDC from the list, despite the country not meeting the LIFDC income criterion or the food-deficit criterion, until the change in its status is verified for three consecutive years.[17]

FAO Member Countries and Flags

The FAO Country Profiles is FAO's source for dissemination of FAO's Member Nations and Associated Nations[18] official flags.[19] The update of any country flag is coordinated with the other United Nations agencies. All flags are made available in a standardized manner which also aims to help web site owners to ensure that they always display the official country flag.

The standard URL for any given country flag would be composed by: the generic URL: "http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/flags/" to which the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code for the country is added, plus the image format suffix ".gif". For instance, the URL for the Argentina flag would be: http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/flags/AR.gif, with AR being the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of Argentina.[20]

Criticism

Early criticism of the FAO Country Profiles was that it only contained few resources. Since 2002, the number of available resources has increased to cover country-based information and data, directly linked from FAO's web pages or FAO's digital repositories.[8] Over the last years, another identified area for improvement was the simplicity of the system methodology, being the resources only linked from country pages and thus, lacking real integration. This need was addressed by starting to integrate additional data, such as, the fisheries charts or the news and events items taken from AgriFeeds.

See also

References
  1. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the languages of the Organization. See FAO's Basic texts at fao.org. The FAO Country Profiles system provides information in Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish. Russian is in preparation.
  2. For reviews of the FAO Country profiles initiatives, see the Sharing Earth and Observations Resources portal Archived 2008-11-20 at the Wayback Machine, Science Central, SciNet Science & Technology Search, News, Articles Archived 2008-09-17 at the Wayback Machine, etc.
  3. See ARTICLE I of FAO Constitution: The Organization shall collect, analyze, interpret, and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture. http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5584E/x5584e0i.htm
  4. Programme of Work and Budget 2002–2003: http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/003/y1194e/y1194e06b.htm#P11324_311453
  5. Programme of Work and Budget 2004–2005: http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/MEETING/006/y9859e/Y9859e07a.htm#P10820_371793
  6. FAO membership as the 17 November 2007: "FAO Legal Office". Archived from the original on 2010-07-14. Retrieved 2010-10-15.
  7. For a list of FAO departments and divisions, please see http://www.fao.org/about/depart/en/ Archived 2010-11-15 at the Wayback Machine
  8. Inventory of data sources used in the FAO country profiles Archived 2009-09-25 at the Wayback Machine
  9. Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49.htm
  10. FAOSTAT standardized list of country/territories and groupings: http://faostat.fao.org/site/441/default.aspx
  11. For linking country-based heterogeneous data at FAO, please see:Integrating Country-based heterogeneous data at the United Nations: FAO's geopolitical ontology and services. Archived 2009-09-25 at the Wayback Machine
  12. For an updated list of Low-Income Food Deficit Countries, please check this page: http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/lifdc/en/
  13. For operational and analytical purposes, the World Bank’s main criterion for classifying economies is gross national income (GNI) per capita. Classifications are set each year on 1 July. These official analytical classifications are fixed during the World Bank's fiscal year (ending on 30 June), thus countries remain in the categories in which they are classified irrespective of any revisions to their per capita income data. (Source: The World Bank)
  14. Several important distinctions among member countries are commonly used at the World Bank Group. Countries choose whether they are part of Part I or Part II primarily on the basis of their economic standing. Part I are almost all industrial countries and donors to IDA and they pay their contributions in freely convertible currency. Part II countries are almost all developing countries, some of which are donors to IDA. Part II countries are entitled to pay most of their contribution to IDA in local currency. Please see: "A Guide to the World Bank Group", The World Bank, 2003
  15. Please see: The World Bank Atlas Method
  16. Net food trade refers to the gross imports less gross exports of food
  17. For a list of countries and economies sorted by their gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita, please see List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita
  18. The list of FAO member countries and date of entry is available at: "FAO Legal Office". Archived from the original on 2010-07-14. Retrieved 2010-10-15.
  19. The list of FAO member countries and flags is available at http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/flags/
  20. One of several international coding systems (some of the others being: ISO2, ISO3, AGROVOC, FAOSTAT, FAOTERM, GAUL, UN, and UNDP) for territories and groups.
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