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FAO Country Profiles

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FAO Country Profiles
Developer(s)Knowledge Exchange Facilitation Branch (KCEW) at FAO of the United Nations
TypeKnowledge Representation, Ontology Editor
WebsiteFAO Country Profiles

FAO Country Profiles

Description

The FAO Country Profiles has been initiated to create a knowledge-based tool linking all kind of data and information produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations within one single Web-based portal, with groupings by country and thematic area.

The system's purpose is to offer decision-makers 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 gives added-value to FAO's wealth of information by providing an easy-to-use interface containing interactive maps and graphics.[1]

Methodology

The methodology of the FAO Country Profiles is rather simple: it performs a structured linking from all of the already existing FAO databases. This means that, the FAO Country Profiles does not produce new data, but brings together documents, statistical data, project details and maps from FAO's existing systems and web sites[2].

The system gathers information from existing resources and re-packages it by country and thematic area.

Thematic areas

The thematic areas are grouped in two categories:

Countries

Standards

Country Profiles

Global Resources

Beside 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 list of the LIFDC[4], as of May 2009, stands at 77 countries, five less than those in the 2008 LIFDC list. These five are: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde and Tonga. All five graduated from the list having completed the "transitional phase", exceeding the World Bank income threshold for three consecutive years.

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[5] to determine eligibility for IDA assistance and for 20-year IBRD terms, applied to countries included in the World Bank categories I and II.[6] For instance, the historical ceiling of per capita gross national income (GNI) for 2006, based on the World Bank Atlas method,[7] was USD 1,735, i.e. higher than the level established for 2005 (USD 1,675).
  2. The net food trade[8] 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.[9]

FAO Member Countries and Flags

The FAO Country Profiles is FAO's source for dissemination of FAO's 192 Member countries[10] official flags[11]. The update of any country flag is coordinated with the other United Nations agencies.

All flags are made available in an 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.[12]

Geopolitical information

Main page:Geopolitical ontology

Common standards are needed to facilitate data exchange and sharing of information, across countries adopting diverse terminologies.[13] FAO's Geopolitical ontology is a master reference tool allowing FAO and its associate parners to rely on common ways of encoding information. It is available in OWL format[14] as well as in HTML[15] and its use is regulated by the FAO copyright.

Criticism

Early criticism of the FAO Country Profiles was that, in its inception phase, it only contained very 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[16]. 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. In addition, in order to provide more complete country profiles, the system started to link or integrate non-FAO resources.

References

  1. ^ For reviews of the FAO Country profiles initiatives, please see the Sharing Earth and Observations Resources portal, Science Central, One Fish, etc.
  2. ^ Inventory of data sources used in the FAO country profiles
  3. ^ For a list of FAO departments and divisions, please see [1]
  4. ^ For an updated list of Low-Income Food Deficit Countries, please check this page: http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/lifdc.asp?lang=en
  5. ^ 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)
  6. ^ Several important distinctions among member countries are commonly used at the 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
  7. ^ Please see: The World Bank Atlas Method
  8. ^ Net food trade refers to the gross imports less gross exports of food
  9. ^ 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
  10. ^ The list of FAO member countries and date of entry is available at: http://www.fao.org/Legal/member-e.htm
  11. ^ The list of FAO member countries and flags is available at [2]
  12. ^ One of several international coding systems (some of the others being: ISO2, ISO3, AGROVOC, FAOSTAT, FAOTERM, GAUL, UN, and UNDP) for territories and groups.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ http://aims.fao.org/aos/geopolitical.owl
  15. ^ http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/geopol_v09/index.html
  16. ^ see http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/inventory.asp for the list of resources available within the country profiles pages.

Category:Agriculture Category:Knowledge representation Category:Information systems Category:United Nations Category:Country codes

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