FAOSTAT clarifies Bosnia’s 14.26 kg coffee availability figure - EXCLUSIVE
The figure of 14.26 kg per capita per year refers to 2023 and represents the Food Balance Sheet (FBS) https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FBS indicator “Food supply quantity (kg/capita/yr)” for the aggregated item “Coffee and products.”
It is important to clarify that this indicator represents food availability for human consumption according to the FBS methodology and should not be interpreted as a direct measurement of the quantity of coffee actually consumed by individuals.
A FAOSTAT source made the clarification in an exclusive interview with CE Report regarding the annual amount of coffee available per person in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The FBS group “Coffee and products” includes coffee at different stages of processing, namely green coffee, roasted or decaffeinated coffee, and coffee extracts. Processed products are converted, where applicable, into their primary commodity equivalent. Therefore, the 14.26 kg figure should not be interpreted as 14.26 kg of roasted or prepared coffee actually consumed per person.
The value disseminated for Bosnia and Herzegovina is flagged in FAOSTAT as “E – Estimated value.”
The FBS food availability indicator refers to food available for consumption by the resident population. Tourist consumption is excluded from this amount and is accounted for separately in the FBS framework through a specific element, “Tourist consumption.”
Therefore, quantities attributed to tourists should not contribute to the per-capita food availability calculated for the resident population. As with other FBS components, the accuracy of this adjustment depends on the availability and quality of the underlying data.
The FAOSTAT series for “Coffee and products” shows the following per-capita availability in Bosnia and Herzegovina:
2019: 12.77 kg/person/year
2020: 13.15 kg/person/year
2021: 14.77 kg/person/year
2022: 14.50 kg/person/year
2023: 14.26 kg/person/year
The data therefore show an increase between 2019 and 2021, followed by a moderate decline in 2022 and 2023. Based on the latest available figures, the recent trend could therefore be described as broadly stabilizing after the earlier increase, rather than as continuously increasing.
The values in this series are flagged as estimated values.
The published FBS indicator should not be used directly to rank countries according to kilograms of roasted or prepared coffee actually consumed.
The standardized FBS aggregates different coffee commodities and expresses processed products, where applicable, in terms of the originating primary commodity. A comparison based specifically on roasted coffee would therefore require analysis at the more disaggregated Supply Utilization Account (SUA) level https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/SCL, taking into account the individual coffee commodities and the corresponding conversion factors.
At the SUA level, the underlying commodities can also be examined separately together with their data flags, allowing users to identify whether individual values are official, estimated or derived from other sources.
The food figure is derived from a food-supply balance rather than from a direct survey of coffee consumption.
The FBS methodology takes into account the different components of supply and utilization, including production, imports, exports and stock changes, as well as the relevant utilization components. After accounting for non-food uses and other adjustments, including tourist consumption where applicable, the quantity available for food is determined.
This quantity is then divided by the resident population to obtain the per-capita food supply quantity.
For this reason, we would recommend referring to the 14.26 kg figure as “per-capita availability of coffee and coffee products” rather than “coffee consumption” in the strict sense.
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