Research Ethiopian commodity statistics online : Ethiopia has the highest inflationary commodity prices

By Anko Zuta, Blogger of De Birhan Blog

27 -6-2011

Thanks God.

So now i began reading other stuffs like romance, how to drink a barrel of beer and the like. I was also reading about data driven journalism. There is even a group called Data Driven Journalism. The Website of the organisation defines data driven journalism as ' Data driven journalism (also known as datajournalism or data journalism) is a journalistic process based on analyzing and filtering large data sets for the purpose of creating a new story."

And also says the other distinction is that data-driven journalism strives to reach new levels of service for the public, helping consumers, managers, politicians to understand patterns and make decisions based on the findings. As such, data driven journalism might help to put journalists into a role relevant for society in a new way.

So I said why not I do some data driven journalism 'meself '.

Do you by the way know about FAO's The Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) Food Price Data and Analysis Tool ?

Well if you don't know it is a price tracking tool which allows to make charts out of different commodities and analyse the price elasticity and related marketing and financial judgements.The new version was just launched in April 2011, so you see i am a VIP to know this lol .

" The Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) Food Price Data and Analysis Tool is a web-based mapping application for managing, assessing, analyzing and disseminating food price data and their potential impact on food security. Available data are mainly collected from national officials sources. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) developed this tool in response to the need for better price information in the wake of the 2008 soaring food prices. " the foodsecuritylink.net reports. GIEWS covers now 78 countries and over 100 price series.

Ethiopia Analysed

Now I for the first time am gonna use the website (http://www.fao.org/giews/pricetool2/) to analyse the food price trend in Ethiopia.

Let me begin with Teff. Our staple food.As the graph below shows the analysis was done based on the retail and wholesale prices of Teff per kilogram in Ethiopian Birr from the year 2000 to April 2011. As can be seen in the graph the wholesale price of a kilo of Teff in 2000 was 2.21birr/KG and now in June 2011 it is 8.58KG. This is the highest ever in the history of Ethiopia . The retail price is 7.83birr/KG.Click on the charts to enlarge :

Mazie

The second type of commodity a did comparison on was maize. I cross examined the price of maize per KG in dollars in Ethiopia,Kenya and International market (USA). In April,2011, a kilogram of Mazie was sold at a retail price of 0.33$, 0.44$ ,0.32$ in Nirobi ,Kenya, Addis Abeba,Ethiopia and USA/Gulf ,International market respectively. This tells that the price in Ethiopia was 10% higher than the others. The difference is expected to have reached over 20% at the end of this month.

See the graph below:

And the following statistics shows the highest and lowest ever prices of maize since 2000 in the three markets. In all the cases, the price in Ethiopia has been the highest.

Next time, I will do further statstical analysis of other commodities. Interestingly enough, Eritrea has no official record of its commodity prices since February 2009 making it impossible to do a comparison with however, within those periods as well, Ethiopia's food inflation was higher.

You can go here (http://www.fao.org/giews/pricetool2/) do your own statistical analysis for any country, city, product and so on.