Overview
World Agricultural Production (WAP) is a monthly report produced by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Foreign Agricultural Service. This report gives data on crop acreage, yield and production for several commodities in major countries around the world. WAP reflects the estimates released in the USDA’s monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE). Current and past reports are available from this resource with monthly reports going as far back as 2002.*
*This description is a paraphrased version of the description on the World Agricultural Production website.
Available data file formats
PDF.
Accessibility
This is an open data source that is for public use.
How to retrieve data by example
Scenario
Suppose you wish to obtain data on the agriculture market in Southeast Asia. Specifically, you would like data on the area, yield and production of rice in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, so as to compare them all. You would like to know the March 2019 information.
Step-by-step
- Go to the World Agricultural Production website and select past reports. Then under Releases section, click on the PDF file after Mar 8, 2019.
- This will open a PDF document. Scroll down through the PDF until you reach the tables of data. Each table corresponds to a different commodity and provides data for select countries that produce that commodity. For the March 2019 report, information on rice can be found in Table 09 Rice Area, Yield, and Production on page 23 of the report. The data for Thailand, Cambodia and Laos can be found under the heading Southeast Asia.
You should now have access to data on the area, yield and production of rice in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos for March 2019. Past reports can be found by returning to the World Agricultural Production page and clicking on Past Reports. This will show all monthly releases previously reported.
Be sure to consult with the source website on how to properly cite your data. For this scenario, an example of the citation in APA format would look something similar to the following:
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, Office of Global Analysis. (2019). World Agricultural Production, March 2019. Retrieved fromhttps://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/5q47rn72z/td96k837n/nz8066095/production.pdf