`United Nations Field Reports to Improve Olive Council Forecasts - Olive Oil Times

United Nations Field Reports to Improve Olive Council Forecasts

By Julie Butler
May. 1, 2013 11:39 UTC

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Data gath­ered by on-the-ground econ­o­mists from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will be shared with the International Olive Council (IOC) in a move that should sharpen fore­casts of future world olive oil pro­duc­tion, accord­ing to IOC Executive Director Jean-Louis Barjol.

Barjol told Olive Oil Times that FAO was about to sign an agree­ment with the IOC which would facil­i­tate infor­ma­tion exchange between them. He said the move was of inter­est to the IOC because it would help con­firm the accu­racy of its data.

FAO has the abil­ity to send econ­o­mists into coun­tries, some­thing we don’t have the abil­ity to do. Thus we’ll have the pos­si­bil­ity of com­par­ing and sup­ple­ment­ing the data we have with what they do in-situ.” This would be par­tic­u­larly help­ful for pro­jec­tions of future pro­duc­tion, Barjol said.

In turn, the IOC will share its data, par­tic­u­larly on olive oil pro­duc­tion, trade and con­sump­tion in var­i­ous coun­tries. FAO is inter­ested in this because we have a series of homo­ge­neous data going back many years,” Barjol said.

The coun­tries we’ve talked about start­ing with are Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco,” he said. These could be fol­lowed by other coun­tries in the Mediterranean basin such as Jordan and Egypt.

Barjol said he under­stood the analy­sis of the sec­tor made by FAO would be made avail­able to inter­na­tional invest­ment funds, such as the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Common Fund for Commodities.

Such orga­ni­za­tions are inter­ested in the infor­ma­tion because they receive requests and loan money for olive oil devel­op­ment projects.

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