Dear Sieg,
You raise a very important point, one which FAO has been focusing on since the beginning of the year. The International Year of Pulses has indeed brought to light some shortcomings of global statistics on pulses. We are now in the final stages of preparing a Global Pulses Economy report, and this issue is a recurrent theme in the publication. Legumes experts in FAO`s Plant Production and Protection Division and experts in the Statistics Division have also been working together continuously to improve the classifications of pulses since the beginning of the year, whereas a tremendous effort is also being made to improve the accuracy and timeliness of the data, which however also depend to a large extent on the quality of data supplied to FAO by countries themselves. Bear in mind that the data received from countries are annually solicited through our production questionnaire where in addition to production quantity data, and areas harvested, we also ask information on ‘availability’ for consumption (the commodity codes in our production questionnaires are CPC based, whereas the detailed trade data are HS based). Most gaps in our time-series are due to the limited provision of data from member countries, where, in any case, we attempt to fill the gaps in with expert estimations. FAO has just launched a new and improved version of the FAOSTAT Web Site, which is the primary instrument for the dissemination of global agricultural statistics, and we expect that improvements to the data on pulses to henceforth be incorporated on a more regular basis.
Dorian
Dorian Kalamvrezos Navarro