Ingest: SPAM 2020 crop production + FAOSTAT producer prices & production

[cboettig]

Requested by SchmidtDSE/unseea — SchmidtDSE/unseea#8, SchmidtDSE/unseea#9.

Turns crop provisioning from a revenue proxy into a measurable service. The catalog has nci-frontiers crop revenue densities (USD/ha, CC0 from Polasky et al. 2026). That is not the same quantity SEEA needs.

Why it matters

SEEA defines crop provisioning as "the ecosystem contributions to the growth of cultivated plants" — not tonnage, and not farm-gate revenue. Booking revenue directly overstates the account by whatever share is attributable to labour, capital and purchased inputs.

The standard method (used by ARIES for SEEA itself, per UNSD Guidelines on Biophysical Modelling §6.4.1) is:

1. SPAM gridded production, adjusted year-on-year by FAOSTAT national production,
2. then the ecosystem contribution via Vallecillo et al. (2019) — the ratio of natural to natural+human inputs in energetic terms.

Step 1 needs both datasets; nothing in the catalog supplies either. Also serves #449 Evaluate (agricultural land-use dependency) and pairs with GLW 4 (#447) for the livestock/grazed-biomass side.

Sources

1. SPAM 2020 (Spatial Production Allocation Model) — IFPRI, ~10 km, 46 crops / crop groups, physical + harvested area, production, yield, by 4 technologies (irrigated / rainfed high-input / low-input / subsistence). https://www.mapspam.info/data/. License CC-BY-4.0. (SPAM 2010 also exists; 2020 is current. A 2010→2020 pair would give a change signal.)
2. FAOSTAT — national production (QCL) and producer prices (PP), annual, long series. https://www.fao.org/faostat/. License CC-BY-4.0.

Scope

• SPAM: raster → H3 native 8, parents 0. ⚠️ Reducer depends on the variable: production (tonnes) and area (ha) are amounts → sum; yield (t/ha) is a density → mean. Ingest production + harvested area as the primary variables.
• FAOSTAT: not spatial — a country × item × year × element lookup table, published as flat parquet with an ISO country key joinable to overture-divisions-countries. No hex.
• Bucket: new public-agriculture (register MinIO scope per Epic: Global biodiversity / nature-positive (TNFD / SBTN) catalog gaps #449 Step 7), or fold SPAM into an existing global bucket.
• Mirror: both CC-BY → source.coop eligible.

Acceptance criteria

• SPAM production + harvested area per crop, COG + hex, with the per-variable reducer documented (amount vs density).
• Crop codes documented and joinable to FAOSTAT item codes.
• FAOSTAT tables as parquet with ISO keys; table:columns populated.
• National SPAM production totals reconcile against FAOSTAT for the reference year (this is the meaningful validation).
• verify-stac.py exits 0; licenses recorded in license-inventory.md.

Note

FAOSTAT is a non-spatial tabular import — if data-workflows is the wrong home for that artefact class, say so and unseea will carry it in-repo instead (cf. SchmidtDSE/unseea#16, which raises the same question for EXIOBASE/ESVD/ENCORE).