IMF Primary Commodity Prices
OfficialIn developmentThe IMF’s Primary Commodity Price System: monthly world market prices for food, fuel and fertiliser. Used for the world prices of wheat, soybeans, soybean meal, corn, rice, sugar, palm oil, beef, Brent crude and urea.
Methodology
Benchmark prices from high-frequency market sources, converted by the IMF to monthly averages. Each series is one benchmark: wheat is US No. 1 hard red winter, rice is Thai 5% broken, sugar is the No. 11 world contract, palm oil is Malaysian, beef is Australian and New Zealand, urea is Black Sea or Middle East. Units differ by series and are kept as published: US dollars per tonne, per barrel or per short ton, and US cents per pound for sugar and beef.
Publisher documentation: https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:PCPS
Collection approach
One request per run to the documented IMF SDMX 2.1 API for all ten commodities, monthly, in US dollars, about two years back, with accept: application/json (the SDMX JSON media type is answered with XML). No key and no cookies.
Method: Machine-readable data feed
Feasibility findings
Measured 20 October 2026
- Access mechanism
- Documented public APIA public API with published documentation and a contract we can rely on.
- Credentials
- Not required for the endpoints measured.
- Collection risk
- Automated access appears permitted and the mechanism is stable.
- Automated access
- api.imf.org/robots.txt answered HTTP 502 from its Azure gateway on 2026-10-20, so no robots policy is published for the API host. The IMF terms, not robots.txt, govern: they prohibit bulk download by automated means without permission, and this connector makes one small request a week.
- Historical depth
- Monthly from 1990 for most commodities. The connector keeps about two years.
- Collection permission
- Established. The publisher’s published terms permit reuse of these figures, on conditions this site meets, such as naming the source. No separate permission was requested. Read the terms.
This is an engineering feasibility assessment, not legal advice. No authentication or access control was bypassed to produce it, and where terms could not be established the risk is recorded as unknown rather than assumed favourable.
Known limitations
- World benchmark prices, not prices in Indonesia: what an Indonesian importer pays adds freight, duties and margins, and moves with the rupiah.
- Monthly averages, published early the following month.
- Units differ by commodity: sugar and beef are in US cents per pound.
- The release date is the dataset’s latest publication, an upper bound for older months.
Data freshness
- Status
- Within the publication cycle promised by the source.
- Newest observation
- 7 October 2026
- Age
- 13 days
- Judged against
- How often this source publishes, with each official series judged on its own schedule
Registry entry
- Code
- IMF
- Organisation
- International Monetary Fund
- Type
- International organisation
- Cadence
- Monthly
- Observations
- 330
- Coverage
- World prices of ten food, fuel and fertiliser commodities, monthly
- Website
- https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:PCPS
- Attribution
- Source: International Monetary Fund, Primary Commodity Prices (PCPS), https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:PCPS.
Recent ingestion history
Every attempt to collect from this source, most recent first.
| Started | Status | Duration | Fetched | Accepted | Rejected | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 October 2026, 06:45 WIB | Success | 3.1s | 330 | 330 | 0 | 1 | — |