The biotrade package analyses international trade of bio-based products. It focuses on the agriculture and forestry sectors, from primary production to secondary products transformation. It loads bilateral trade data from UN Comtrade, production and trade data from FAOSTAT and socio-economic indicators from the World Bank.

Installation

Base installation

Install from the main branch of a private repo on gitlab using an authentication token. The tokens will not be necessary once biotrade becomes publicly available.

pip install git+https://<token>@gitlab.com/bioeconomy/forobs/biotrade.git@main

To install a previous version specify the git tag, for example v0.0.1

pip install git+https://<token>@gitlab.com/bioeconomy/forobs/biotrade.git@v0.0.1

To install the latest development version, use also the --upgrade flag:

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall git+https://<token>@gitlab.com/bioeconomy/forobs/biotrade.git@dev

Installation for contributors

If you plan to contribute to the development of the biotrade package, clone the repository and tell python where it is located by adding it to your PYTHONPATH. You can do this by changing the environment variables or by adding the following line to your shell configuration file such as .bash_aliases:

export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/repos/biotrade/":$PYTHONPATH

Specify where you want to store the data by adding the following environment variable:

export BIOTRADE_DATA="$HOME/repos/biotrade_data/"

Dependencies are listed in the install_requires argument of setup.py.

Usage

The biotrade package can download data from FAOSTAT and UN Comtrade and store it inside a database. By default it will use an SQLite database stored locally in the folder defined by the environment variable BIOTRADE_DATA. Alternatively, a PostGRESQL database can be used if a connection string is defined in the environment variable BIOTRADE_DATABASE_URL, for example by adding the following to your .bash_aliases or .bash_rc:

export BIOTRADE_DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user@localhost/biotrade"

Note that database queries are abstracted with SQL Alchemy which is what makes it possible to use different database engines. SQLite is convenient for data analysis on laptops. PostGreSQL can be used on servers.

FAOSTAT

Faostat provides agriculture and forestry data on their website https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/

The biotrade package has a faostat.pump object that loads a selection of datasets. The list of downloaded datasets is visible in faostat.pump.datasets. Column names and product descriptions are reformatted to snake case in a way that is convenient for analysis. The data is then stored into an SQLite database (or PostgreSQL). The following commands download and transfer the given datasets to the database:

>>> from biotrade.faostat import faostat
>>> faostat.pump.update(["crop_production", "crop_trade"])
>>> faostat.pump.update(["forestry_production", "forestry_trade", "forest_land"])
>>> faostat.pump.update(["food_balance"])
>>> faostat.pump.update(["land_use", "land_cover"])

List available datasets and metadata links:

>>> faostat.pump.datasets
>>> faostat.pump.metadata_link

Once the data has been loaded into the database, you can query it. For example select crop production data for 2 countries

>>> from biotrade.faostat import faostat
>>> db = faostat.db_sqlite
>>> cp2 = db.select(table="crop_production",
>>>                 reporter=["Portugal", "Estonia"])

Select forestry trade flows data reported by all countries, with Austria as a partner country:

>>> ft_aut = db.select(table="forestry_trade",
>>>                    partner=["Austria"])

Select crop trade flows reported by the Netherlands where Brazil was a partner

>>> ct_nel_bra = db.select(table="crop_trade",
>>>                        reporter="Netherlands",
>>>                        partner="Brazil")

Select the mirror flows reported by Brazil, where the Netherlands was a partner

>>> ct_bra_bel = db.select(table="crop_trade",
>>>                        reporter="Brazil",
>>>                        partner="Netherlands")

Select land use and land cover data

>>> lu = faostat.db.select("land_use")
>>> lc = faostat.db.select("land_cover")

Comtrade

See the documentation of the various methods. As an example here is how to download trade data from the Comtrade API and return a data frame, for debugging purposes:

>>> from biotrade.comtrade import comtrade
>>> # Other sawnwood
>>> swd99 = comtrade.pump.download(cc = "440799")
>>> # Soy
>>> soy = comtrade.pump.download(cc = "120190")

Display information on column names used for renaming and dropping less important columns:

>>> comtrade.column_names

Get the list of products from the Comtrade API

>>> hs = comtrade.pump.get_parameter_list("classificationHS.json")

Get the list of reporter and partner countries

>>> comtrade.pump.get_parameter_list("reporterAreas.json")
>>> comtrade.pump.get_parameter_list("partnerAreas.json")

Metadata and configuration data

Release dates

FAOSTAT release dates are available at : https://fenixservices.fao.org/faostat/static/releasecalendar/Default.aspx

Variable definitions and harmonization

Column names and product descriptions are reformatted to snake case in a way that is convenient for analysis. See example below.

• Variables are defined and compared between the data sources in a notebook called definitions_and_harmonization

• Variable names are harmonized between the different sources using a mapping table defined in biotrade/config_data/column_names.csv See for example how the product_code column is called PRODUCT_NC in Eurostat Comext, commodity_code or cmdcode in UN Comtrade and item_code in FAOSTAT.

• snake_case is the preferred way of naming files and variables in the code. This follows the R tidyverse style guide for object names and the python PEP 8 style guide for function and variable names.

To illustrate the advantage of using snake case for data exploration, compare the use of column names with space which have to be quoted. Python

>>> df["Product Code"]
>>> df.product_code

R

R> df["Product Code"]
R> df$`Product Code`
R> df$product_code

Configuration data

The biotrade package stores a small amount of configuration data such as country and product mapping tables and conversion coefficients in the biotrade/config_data folder.

Licence

This software is licenced under the MIT licence. See the LICENCE.md file.

Similar projects

• The python package pandas-datareader

• The R packages FAOSTAT and WDI

Tests

This package uses pytest for unit testing. Run the test suite with

pytest

Run pytest with code coverage

cd python_project_dir
coverage run --source=. -m pytest

Followed by

coverage html

To generate a report. These tests are run as part of the Continuous Integration.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge ideas and feedback received from the following persons: Lucas Sinclair, Roberto Pilli, Mirco Migliavacca, Giovanni Bausano.

Noemi Cazzaniga's package eurostat was taken as an inspiration to load Eurostat data from the bulk download repository.