Project Stinky — ENTRY discussions

[Martin Damus]

Hello fellow ENTRY team members. This is more of a test to see if the forum would work for our discussions, but also a bit of information on what I’ve been trying to find.

I’ve been trying to find data that can be used to estimate chance of entry of our subject pest, based on being a hitchhiker on unspecified, but probably palleted and containerised, non-chilled and non-petroleum commodities. Oh, and I hope the data is free of charge.

So, I’ve found information that is free, but it is limited to ocean traffic, not air cargo, and it is by ‘economic group’, such as ‘Developing economies: Africa’, and ‘Developed economies: Europe’. Information is non-directional, and in tons. It is available here: http://unctad.org/en/Pages/Statistics.aspx#, by searching to the appropriate pages (maritime transport).

On the off-chance that directional movement of plant and animal products and by-products (available on the FAOStat database; too bad we didn’t pick a plant-commodity-associated pest …) are a good proxy of total directional trade movement, I took the FAO data for Canada, and the Industry Canada trade data for non-plant/animal products, and there is very little correlation between the two — Canada’s plant product imports are not sourced from the same countries in similar proportion to our non-plant imports. I thought so, but wanted to check.

Air Cargo: this site holds promise for air cargo shipments: http://openflights.org/data.html. It has a modest fee for their entire dataset ($50), but I did a quick search for known air cargo carriers, and found one for Germany, although it went out of business in 2013, but Air Canada Cargo, for instance, is not listed. So I haven’t bought the dataset, but wonder if anyone had other opinions / sources for air cargo data. And sea cargo, too.

That’s all for today. Cheers,
Martin

[Martin Damus]

This site would be useful if we modeled movement among specific countries as a means to gathering an ‘average risk’ measure.

http://www.trademap.org/tradestat/index.aspx

[Hanna Huitu]

Hello!
Thank you Martin for the work on going trough data availability. I’d like to add one more possible data source. Free Eurostat (Or ComExt) database seems to contain total directional trade for the 28 reporting EU countries – to and from in total 283 reporting entities including countries and groups of countries, and to my understanding representing the whole globe. The trade is expressed in Euros and tons, and monthly and yearly figures are available. Products are classified at least with HS system. If we proceed with the idea on having one of the case countries in Europe, this might be useful:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/international-trade/data/database

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