For assessing the economic impact of drought through various indicators (see 'What can you get from d-iap' section), the producer price is required. The producer price represents the compensation received by producers for each unit of goods or services sold, determined 'at the farm gate' or initial point of sale. This price excludes any VAT or similar deductible taxes invoiced to the purchaser and any separately invoiced transport charges by the producer. The data were sourced from FAOSTAT and primarily originated from national sources collected through the FAO questionnaire, which gathers information on annual and monthly producer prices for primary crops. The data were downloaded and analyzed to determine a central value that represents the price distribution. These prices, measured in dollars per tonne, span from 1991 to 2022 and encompass annual values for all crops. For cross-country price comparisons, prices are directly converted into dollars. However, to conduct year-on-year comparisons accurately, inflation must be considered.

The World Bank defines six measures of inflation: Headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation, Food CPI inflation, Energy CPI inflation, Core CPI inflation, Producer Price Index inflation, and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflator. The GDP deflator, used in d-iap assessments, represents the change in prices over time for a product or a basket of products by comparing a reference period to a base period. It is calculated by dividing the current price value of a given aggregate by its real counterpart. To obtain real prices, the producer prices were divided by the decimal form of the GDP deflator (sourced from FAOSTAT), expressed in dollars using 2015 as the base year. This allows for the calculation of real values that account for country inflation, thus providing a more accurate representation of purchasing power over time. Although the FAO provides the Producer Price Index, which records annual changes in the selling prices received by farmers, this index was not used due to its limited data compared to the GDP deflator.

When retrieving FAO producer price data, certain countries may have incomplete or missing datasets. To address this issue, countries were categorized based on socioeconomic and geographic factors. Central values were calculated using the median value, which is more robust and less sensitive to outliers. In cases where countries have inadequate data or fewer than five prices available, the median of the group was used instead. If insufficient data availability could not mitigate unreliable data, 'NO DATA' was recorded in the generated database.