FAO Food Price Index

FAO Food Price Index

The FAO Food Price Index tracks the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities, with sub-indices for cereals, vegetable oils, dairy, meat and sugar. FAO publishes it monthly as Excel and CSV files with nominal and real values.

Coverage

International commodity prices, monthly from 1990 and annual from 1961. The page says: "The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities." Downloads include nominal and real indices as Excel and a CSV of nominal monthly indices.

Verdict

A headline global food-inflation signal for macro, commodity and food-security agents. The index is weighted by average export shares, and FAO has revised its base period before, so keep the edition with any stored series. Licence: Custom: the index page carries only an FAO copyright line and links FAO's website Terms and Conditions, which say "All other content on the FAO website (except where otherwise indicated), may be copied, printed and downloaded for private study, research and teaching purposes, and for use in non-commercial products or services, provided that appropriate acknowledgement of FAO as the source and copyright holder is given and that FAO's endorsement of users' views, products or services is not stated or implied in any way." The same terms say "Specific statistical databases are covered by the Open Data Licensing Policy, and governed by the Statistical Databases Terms of Use."; the FFPI is not listed among those databases, so the general web-content terms apply. Commercial use needs FAO's permission. Rate limits: Not stated. Signal Lab links only.