(Food News and Information) he Foreign Agriculture Service FAS of the US Department of Agriculture USDA began producing a series of geographic information system GISbased maps of the damaged agricultural areas to accompany its commodity intelligence reports Redlands CA July 9 2008 Subsequent to Cyclone Nargis a category 3 tropical storm that struck the lowlying and heavily populated coastline of Myanmar on May 2 2008 the Foreign Agriculture Service FAS of the US Department of Agriculture USDA began producing a series of geographic information system GISbased maps of the damaged agricultural areas to accompany its commodity intelligence reports Published on the FAS Web site these maps are created using geospatial data and the technology found in ESRIs ArcGIS Desktop software The mission of FAS is to improve foreign market access to US agricultural products build new markets improve the competitive position of US agriculture in the global marketplace and provide food aid and technical assistance to foreign countries FAS achieves a part of this mission by analyzing global crop production capacity with remotesensing and GIS tools and by issuing commodity intelligence reports highlighting current international crop conditions GISbased maps available in PDF format provide a visualization of the analysis performed and often serve as each reports basis The commodity intelligence reports issued for the country formerly known as Burma focus on ...
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