FAO Food Price Index

The FAO or the Food and agriculture organization of the United Nations is an agency that works toward defeating hunger.

The FAO releases a report called the Monthly Food Price Index. The monthly report contains the following indices: Food Price Index, Meat Index, Dairy Index, Cereals Index, Oils & Fats Index and Sugar Index. In this report, the FAO measures the indices based on export prices instead of domestic retail prices.

This food price index downloader retrieves historical monthly data for the above indices and for a period that starts in January 1990. After the data is downloaded, the following ticker symbols are created: ^FOOD_PRICE_INDEX, ^MEAT_PRICE_INDEX, ^DAIRY_PRICE_INDEX, ^CEREALS_PRICE_INDEX, ^OILS_PRICE_INDEX, ^SUGAR_PRICE_INDEX.

The Food price index consists of the mean of the other commodity price indices. In total, about 55 commodity prices are included in the calculation of the food price index. The other indices are also composed of a basket of commodities. As an example, the Dairy Price Index is computed based on the prices of butter, SMP, WMP, cheese and casein.

Note that this trading item requires that Microsoft Excel is installed on your computer. This is because the FAO Food Price Index Data file is available only in Excel (XLS) format. There are three sheets in the Excel file. The one whose name is "Monthly" is parsed while the others ("Annual", "Notes") are ignored.

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