The ''World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates'' (WASDE) is a monthly report published by the

United States Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food. It aims to meet the needs of com ...

(USDA) providing comprehensive forecast of

supply and demand In microeconomics, supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It postulates that, holding all else equal, in a competitive market, the unit price for a particular good, or other traded item such as labor or ...

for major crops (global and United States) and livestock (U.S. only). The report provides an analysis of the fundamental condition of the agricultural

commodity market A commodity market is a market that trades in the primary economic sector rather than manufactured products, such as cocoa, fruit and sugar. Hard commodities are mined, such as gold and oil. Futures contracts are the oldest way of investing ...

s for the use of farmers, governments and other

market participant The term market participant is another term for economic agent, an actor and more specifically a decision maker in a model of some aspect of the economy. For example, ''buyers'' and ''sellers'' are two common types of agents in partial equilibrium ...

s. The WASDE report is compiled using information from a number of statistical reports produced by the USDA and other government agencies.WASDE Website
/ref> It is widely considered to be the benchmark to which all other private and public agricultural forecasts are compared. The recent releases of the WASDE report provide forecasts covering: *Crops (U.S. and global) including wheat, rice,

corn Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. The ...

sorghum ''Sorghum'' () is a genus of about 25 species of flowering plants in the grass family (Poaceae). Some of these species are grown as cereals for human consumption and some in pastures for animals. One species is grown for grain, while many other ...

, barley,

oat The oat (''Avena sativa''), sometimes called the common oat, is a species of cereal grain grown for its seed, which is known by the same name (usually in the plural, unlike other cereals and pseudocereals). While oats are suitable for human con ...

soybean The soybean, soy bean, or soya bean (''Glycine max'') is a species of legume native to East Asia, widely grown for its edible bean, which has numerous uses. Traditional unfermented food uses of soybeans include soy milk, from which tofu an ...

s, cotton, and sugar. *Livestock (U.S. only) including meat animals, poultry, and dairy. The WASDE report is generally released between the 8th and 12th of each month at 12:00 noon

Eastern Time The Eastern Time Zone (ET) is a time zone encompassing part or all of 23 states in the eastern part of the United States, parts of eastern Canada, the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico, Panama, Colombia, mainland Ecuador, Peru, and a small port ...

. It is available in electronic form (as a

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems ...

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operatin ...

) and can be downloaded from the USDA website from the time of release. Subscription to the report can be made through the ''Albert R. Mann Library'' for delivery by e-mail shortly after release on the Internet. As a

work of the United States government A work of the United States government, is defined by the United States copyright law, as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties." "A 'work of the United States Governmen ...

, the WASDE reports are released into the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

in accordance with

U.S. copyright law The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of the ...

, .

History

Predecessor publications date back to the 19th century. In 1893, the USDA Division of Statistics published ''Production and distribution of the principal agricultural products of the world'', a miscellaneous report representing several months of work in compiling the first overview of production of major crops around the world.United States. Dept. of Agriculture. Division of Statistics. ''Production and distribution of the principal agricultural products of the world.'' Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Division of Statistics, 1893., 205 pp., available in the National Agricultural Library, Call Number: 1 St2B no.

/ref> Subsequent such reports appeared irregularly, and evolved by the 1960s into commodity-oriented circulars published at regular intervals by USDA agencies. The first direct predecessor of the WASDE report was released on September 17, 1973, as the ''Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates''.Rich Allen,
Safeguarding America's Agricultural Statistics
''U.S. Department of Agriculture'', April 2007 It was originally focused on Supply (economics), supply,

demand In economics, demand is the quantity of a good that consumers are willing and able to purchase at various prices during a given time. The relationship between price and quantity demand is also called the demand curve. Demand for a specific item ...

and trade in the United States. On October 14, 1980, the report was released for the first time as the ''World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates'' and it was the first report to provide categorized estimates for the world, US, total foreign, major importers and major exporters. Estimates for individual countries were first included in the report released on January 11, 1985.

Footnotes

{{reflist

External links

United States Department of Agriculture
an
public domain policy

World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates WebsiteAlbert R. Mann LibraryArchive of Historical WASDE Reports
*Video:
How the WASDE Report Is Prepared
''U.S. Department of Agriculture'' *Rich Allen,
Safeguarding America's Agricultural Statistics
''U.S. Department of Agriculture'', April 2007
Understanding USDA Crop Forecasts
''U.S. Department of Agriculture'' United States Department of Agriculture

History

See also

Footnotes

External links