Report on the demand for data by end users of organic market data (= Deliverable 1.1 of the OrganicDataNetwork project. Survey of the organic market data needs of end users)

Summary

High quality organic market data is desirable and important for both economic and societal reasons. Currently, important market data do not exist in most European countries, standardization is missing and data are seldom comparable within one country over time and between countries. Furthermore, detailed information on specific commodities is missing. The goals of this report are to identify the needs and demands of end users of organic market data, and to find areas of information asymmetry, which involves undertaking an appraisal of the quality of the existing available data that is used. However, many different data collection methods are currently used and the variety of agencies collecting data in the various European countries mean that gaining a European level
overview of the quality of existing data is difficult.
Despite these difficulties, this report presents an overview of end users demands for different data types at a European level, and offers an overview of the end users demand for various data types in five European countries: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. An online survey was conducted in which demand and use was assessed for 15 data types. Furthermore, the quality of each of these data types was rated against a set of quality criteria. It was found that relevance of data is the fundamental quality criteria, and relevant data will be used; even if it considered as being of poor quality against other quality criteria. Many respondents report using data that is considered by experts to not exist, which suggests that data users make use of whatever data they can find if it considered relevant. Many respondents report that existing data does not exist, which suggests that the users cannot find the data and therefore points to dissemination problems.