Kafkas Caprazli: CountrySTAT is an internet based one-stop shop for national food, agriculture and nutrition statistics. It is usually installed in and managed by national statistics offices and draws together statistics from various national sources. It is fully owned and managed by partner countries. Policy makers and Analysts are its target users.

Fabio Grita : The GIEWS Workstation is a powerful food security and early warning data management tool. Its analytical tools can help users identify emerging food security emergencies. The Workstation can handle a great variety of data – everything from statistics to prices to satellite images showing vegetation conditions and rainfall and weather patterns. Its news tool retrieves food security and emergency related news from different sources twenty-four hours a day.

The GIEWS Workstation is not located in one office, but is based on a network of decentralized databases.

DM: What is most innovative about the GIEWS Workstation?

FG: The Workstation’s communication tool - which is still being developed - will allow different databases to talk to each other in a decentralized way. Databases can be tailored to suit local needs and preserve the peculiarity of the data – such as using local measurement units and currencies. Furthermore, thanks to the Workstation's security system, institutions retain full control of data and can share or restrict access as they see fit.

Using the highly innovative Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) classification system, data can be stored even at the provincial level. This is extremely important, as statistics and data at the national level can hide the fact that there may be huge differences in the country.

DM: What is most innovative about CountrySTAT?

KC: CountrySTAT is changing the future of handling and publishing food and agriculture statistics by pulling national statistical data producers together under one framework umbrella; Policy makers and analysts, who are constantly in need of reliable statistical information and primary analysis, can go to a central place for their data requirements and read it in their national language.

Because CountrySTAT fully complies with international standards and classifications, national statistics can be fully integrated with statistics from other national and international databases like FAOSTAT. CountrySTAT also offers links to other national and international statistical information providers.

DM: Where will CountrySTAT be implemented first?

KC: More than twenty countries and regional organizations around the world have requested CountrySTAT. By the end of 2006, and thanks to funding from the EC-FAO Food Security Information for Action Programme, CountrySTAT will be implemented in five of these countries: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Malawi, Mozambique, and Sudan. They will all be fully operational by 2007.

DM: Where will the GIEWS Workstation be implemented first?

FG: Armenia is our first pilot country. The GIEWS Workstation will be implemented in other programme countries that have requested it as well.

DM: How do CountrySTAT and the GIEWS workstation complement each other?

KC: CountrySTAT provides the GIEWS Workstation with time-series data and indicators that are the basis for solid estimation and forecasting and thus for issuing reliable early warning. The GIEWS Workstation and CountrySTAT evolve together by synchronizing data and metadata classification and organization. For example, they both use international standards and codes for data and metadata such as GAUL and SDMX (ISO/IEC 11179).

FG: The use of common standards is indeed very important. Other standards we use include the Harmonized Commodity System used by the World Customs Organization. We are also getting ready for compliancy with the ISO 19115 for Metadata.

CountrySTAT and the GIEWS Workstation are complementary in the type of data they handle: CountrySTAT deals with consolidated statistical data while the Workstation deals with both historical and forecast data. Furthermore, the GIEWS Workstation also contains non-statistical information such as satellite images, GIS layers, news and text.