Maclean et al. - 2002 - Rice almanac source book for the most important e

Drying rice in southern Vietnam.
scale is adequate to cover most instances, but
not all. For some countries (Uruguay and
Australia) in some years, FAO data show that
exports exceeded total production. This is
possible if some of the exports in a given year
came from the previous year’s production.
The source of raw data for all graphs is the
FAOSTAT online electronic database, and the
most recent data for any given category are
preliminary. All indices for production, area
harvested, and yield per hectare are based on an
index value of 1966 = 100.
National statistical organizations do not
produce data on area and production under
different rice ecosystems. The basic source of
IRRI’s information on rice areas by ecosystem is
the surveys by R. and E. Huke 1 . The data are
estimates from the returns of agricultural
censuses and available Landsat imagery and
other maps.
Some estimates of rice yields for different
ecosystems are from personal communications
with national agricultural research scientists and
outposted IRRI scientists. To make the data
consistent with total rice production for a
country, as published by FAO, we used the
yields reported by the national system for the
minor ecosystems and used the residual as the
yield from the major ecosystem. Production
figures for each ecosystem were derived from
area and yield estimates.
Some general information about the various
countries was taken from the World Factbook
2000 (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) 2 and The
World Guide 2001/2002 3 .
All other information is from the FAO Agrostat
database and from statistical publications of
individual countries.
Note that in the General Information section
for each country, GNI is gross national income. It
is a new term for what was formerly referred to
as GNP (gross national product). PPP is
purchasing power parity. PPP compensates for
the fact that prices of many commodities or
services differ between countries. If country A
has lower (higher) prices than in the base country
(usually the United States) for comparable items,
the purchasing power of any given quantity of
money will be greater (less) in country A than in
the United States, and the GNI in PPP$ of
country A will be higher (lower) than its GNI.
The GNI per capita in PPP$ (as presented in the
country pages for year 2000) is a better measure
of income than GNI when comparing levels of
material well-being across countries.
1
Huke RE, Huke EH. 1997. Rice area by type of culture: South, Southeast, and East Asia, a revised and updated data base. IRRI, Manila.
2
Web site: www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook.
3
New Internationalist Publications, Oxford, England.
60 Rice almanac