One thing that falls potentially into all three categories of difficulty is food stocks/reserves, which is an issue with high relevance to exposure to shocks and food insecurity, but really hard to track.
It’s a tricky issue, but could really help many researchers inside and outside of EA to improve!
A few issues we have found which would be very useful to see developed are:
The USDA PSD and FAOSTAT both have estimates for crop year end, but as crop years do not line up effective stocks are higher than this figure. These results are based on a few methodologies, but do not match reality exactly, and are better for globally traded crops.
Reconcilliation and improving on these estimates is possible, but requires detailed trade data or insider data, which is very commercially sensitive often. Big traders (ABCD companies/COFCO) would know this, but they do not disclose.
Stocks can be reasonably accurate at a global level and when averaged over a period of time, however fluctuations in demand, smuggling and delays in data releases mean they can be hard to track on a country by country basis for the poorest. These are often the countries we care most about for food insecurity.
Stocks in strategic reserves, private reserves and simply in transit can be difficult to divide out. In some cases this suggests chunks of available stocks are missing, or that stocks would not be available to the market if classed as “private” when actually state controlled.
Hi Ed!
One thing that falls potentially into all three categories of difficulty is food stocks/reserves, which is an issue with high relevance to exposure to shocks and food insecurity, but really hard to track.
It’s a tricky issue, but could really help many researchers inside and outside of EA to improve!
A few issues we have found which would be very useful to see developed are:
The USDA PSD and FAOSTAT both have estimates for crop year end, but as crop years do not line up effective stocks are higher than this figure. These results are based on a few methodologies, but do not match reality exactly, and are better for globally traded crops.
Reconcilliation and improving on these estimates is possible, but requires detailed trade data or insider data, which is very commercially sensitive often. Big traders (ABCD companies/COFCO) would know this, but they do not disclose.
Stocks can be reasonably accurate at a global level and when averaged over a period of time, however fluctuations in demand, smuggling and delays in data releases mean they can be hard to track on a country by country basis for the poorest. These are often the countries we care most about for food insecurity.
Stocks in strategic reserves, private reserves and simply in transit can be difficult to divide out. In some cases this suggests chunks of available stocks are missing, or that stocks would not be available to the market if classed as “private” when actually state controlled.