JACQUES LAHAUSSOIS
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations
In accordance with the recommendations of the Advisory Committee, the Recovered Paper Data publication will continue to be published annually. Furthermore, as last year, the survey will be conducted in co-operation with the Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI), with CEPI collecting the information from European countries and FAO from the other countries in the world. CEPI will continue its own publication while the recovered paper data survey for the world will be issued as a joint publication, CEPI-FAO. The survey will be issued around July-August 2000.
Suggestions were made at the last Session about the establishment of a small working group to review the classification and data collection procedures. No proposals for activities or for participants were received in this regard and, unless instructed otherwise, the Secretariat will assume that the Recovered Paper Data survey can continue to be conducted as last year.
FAO collects production and capacity figures by grade and by country for all countries in the world. Similar information is collected by CEPI for the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, plus: Czech Republic, Hungary, Norway, Switzerland and Slovakia.
Most of the recipients in European countries are the same, the only difference being the level of detail of the information requested.
CEPI's statutes do not authorize publication of country statistics for products where there are less than three producers in the country, or if one of them represents more than 80 percent of the total, in which case the data must be grouped with another country or other countries. FAO is not bound by this restriction and issues a questionnaire which covers grade production and capacity in more detail than CEPI.
The recipients have to respond to two questionnaires and are sometimes unsure of the grouping of grades, resulting in different reporting of figures between the two organizations. To simplify and standardize data collection, while respecting CEPI's confidentiality requirements, CEPI and FAO have agreed to present the following proposal to their respective Board/Committee and if the proposal is accepted by both parties to implement it for data collection in 2001.
– FAO will send questionnaires, as currently designed, to all its contacts in the world;
– FAO will forward to CEPI, without processing, the answers received from CEPI member countries and associate members;
– CEPI will process and publish the information, after screening the data to respect confidentiality requirements of its member countries;
– FAO will process and publish the information as it does currently;
– CEPI and FAO will issues their own publication under their respective name.
The main advantages of this proposal are that the recipients will only answer one set of questionnaires, that data will be the same, and that there will not be additional work for CEPI and FAO.
Members of the advisory committee are invited to comment on this proposal and to issue a recommendation its acceptance or refusal.