This system to disseminate up-to-date information on prices of agricultural commodities was developed and is maintained by the Commodities and Trade Division of FAO.
Note that in addition to this explanatory note, there are additional notes relating to individual commodities.
Some data are provided on a weekly basis, others with monthly observations.
The data generated by any request can be downloaded to a .csv file to be incorporated into a spreadsheet by the user.
There are four types of report available from weekly data:
Each weekly observation is recorded under the date of the Friday at the end of each week but the observation is not necessarily the price on that Friday - some prices are recorded on other days, while some are averages, or estimated averages, for the week. The user should check the notes provided for individual commodities.
Monthly and annual averages of weekly data are simple (unweighted) averages of the available observations. No attempt is made to adjust for missing values - the function simply averages whatever weekly entries there are in a month or in a year. In any month where there are no weekly observations, the monthly average is shown as a missing value. As the average for a month is in fact the average of the Fridays within that month, some prices recorded during a week near the end of a month will be averaged into the following month.
There are three types of report available from monthly data: