Global Commodity Data Source Brief
Assessment of source quality for a student project focused on worldwide production and sale/trade data for coffee, tea, cocoa/chocolate, yerba mate, and matcha. Built to help a mixed-interest student team choose a realistic project scope.
Best practical scope: start with coffee + tea + cocoa for a solid cross-country project. Add yerba mate only if a narrower South America angle is acceptable. Treat matcha as a special-case extension because it is often buried inside green-tea categories.
Recommended source stack
- Production: FAOSTAT
- Trade: UN Comtrade
- Coffee-specific context: International Coffee Organization (ICO)
- Tea-specific context: International Tea Committee (ITC)
- Cocoa-specific context: International Cocoa Organization (ICCO)
- Market/sales: use carefully; often weaker, paywalled, or based on commercial estimates rather than open official data
Source comparison
FAOSTAT
Best official source for global agricultural production by country and year. Strong for coffee, tea, and cocoa. Useful for consistent historical time series.
Strengths: authoritative, global coverage, long time span, machine-readable.
Weaknesses: not retail sales; processed products may not map cleanly to crop production concepts.
UN Comtrade
Best for imports/exports using HS codes. Works well for coffee, tea, cocoa beans, cocoa products, yerba mate, and some matcha-related trade categories.
Strengths: global trade coverage, country pairs, product code detail.
Weaknesses: product-code complexity; trade is not the same thing as production or final sales.
ICO / ITC / ICCO
These bodies are excellent for context, benchmark statistics, and domain-specific reporting for coffee, tea, and cocoa respectively.
Strengths: commodity expertise, curated statistics, useful publications.
Weaknesses: some access may be partial, publication formats may be less tidy than FAOSTAT/Comtrade.
Commercial market reports
Often the only easy source for “market size” or “global sales” estimates for yerba mate and matcha.
Strengths: useful for modern market framing.
Weaknesses: methodology opacity, paywalls, inconsistent definitions, hard to reproduce.
Commodity-by-commodity assessment
Coffee
Best-supported commodity in the set. Excellent production and trade data. Strong institutional support from ICO.
Tea
Strong production and trade data. Good industry/statistical support. Global comparisons are feasible.
Cocoa / chocolate
Cocoa is strong. Chocolate is harder because it is a processed consumer product and doesn’t map as neatly to agricultural production.
Yerba mate
Trade codes exist and market estimates exist, but official global institutional support is weaker. Better for a regional comparison angle.
Matcha
Best treated as a subcategory of green tea or as a modern specialty-market case study. Hard to compare cleanly against coffee/tea/cocoa at global scale.
Recommended project scopes for a student team
Scope A — safest / strongest
Coffee + tea + cocoa
Best balance of production and trade coverage with credible international sources.
Scope B — beverage crop focus
Coffee + tea + yerba mate
Interesting conceptually, but yerba mate reduces data consistency and global comparability.
Scope C — specialty extension
Coffee + tea + matcha as case study
Good if the team wants a “global commodity + premium niche product” angle, but matcha should not be treated as equally robust in the data model.
Scope D — consumer product angle
Coffee + tea + chocolate
Possible, but be careful: chocolate is not the same data concept as cocoa. This scope needs explicit caveats and a stronger reconciliation layer.
Key methodological warning
Do not casually compare:
- crop production vs processed consumer product sales
- trade volume vs domestic consumption
- a parent category like tea vs a subtype like matcha
The cleanest project will keep production, trade, and market-size questions separated or explicitly reconciled.
Likely next step
Build a reproducible source stack around FAOSTAT + UN Comtrade + commodity-specific organization data, then test whether the chosen project scope has enough overlap in country-year coverage to support the comparison you want.