The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA/FAS) announced today it is changing its country groupings in its online Production, Supply and Distribution database to reflect the expansion of the European Union (EU) from 15 to 25 countries.

In addition to the EU-15 designation in the commodity tables, a new designation, EU-25, has been added to reflect EU expansion. The EU-15 group shows data through 1998, and the new EU-25 group includes data beginning in 1999. The groups Eastern Europe and Other Western Europe are discontinued and the remaining non-EU countries are rolled into Other Europe. The designation for the Former Soviet Union (FSU) becomes FSU-12, consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. In addition, the Other Asia category is split into East Asia and Southeast Asia.

The production, supply and distribution database covers 108 agricultural commodities in more than 190 countries. It is updated monthly and has historical data to 1960. It provides users with a global picture of crop production broken down by commodity attributes, countries and years. Users can view all facets of the database onscreen or download data to a spreadsheet file. Pre-defined tables categorized by commodity groups are readily available, or users can customize queries for specific commodities.

The production, supply and distribution database can be found on the FAS Web site at http://www.fas.usda.gov/psd. 

In addition to this database, FAS also maintains trade databases with import and export statistics for bulk, intermediate and consumer-oriented products. Links to all of these databases are located at http://www.fas.usda.gov/data.html.