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Independent rankings built from public data — every figure traceable to the body that published it.
Report year 1996Data year 1996
Land area (sq. km)Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a scorePublished by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
64 reference years (1961–2024), covering 185 to 222 countries, from FAOSTAT's Land Use domain (item 6601, element 5110) — read from the FAO's own bulk download, not from the World Bank's copy. ⚠ LAND area, not surface area: FAOSTAT publishes both, and this one excludes inland water, national claims to the continental shelf and exclusive economic zones. It is the figure normally quoted as a country's size. ⚠ Not the World Bank's AG.LND.TOTL.K2: comparing 2022 row for row, 26 of the 215 countries both carry differ. Malta is 315.15 km² at the FAO and a round 320 at the Bank; Serbia and Ethiopia differ by thousands, because the Bank is serving an older FAOSTAT release. ⚠ Converted from the FAO's own unit of 1000 hectares by multiplying by ten, which is exact — a unit change, not a rounding. ⚠ The early editions are smaller because FAOSTAT reports dissolved states for the years they existed: the USSR has a land area until 1991 and its fifteen successors begin in 1992, and those historical entities are dropped rather than mapped onto today's countries. ⚠ Three registry entities have no FAOSTAT row: Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland. ⚠ A statistic with no better end — a big country is not a better one, and the FAO ranks nobody on it.
FAOSTAT Land Use: land area, 1996 — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Cite as: FAO. FAOSTAT Land, Inputs and Sustainability: Land Use. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Licence: CC BY 4.0
A country's total area excluding inland water, as published by the FAO in FAOSTAT's Land Use domain (item 6601, element 5110), read from the FAO's own bulk download rather than from a redistributor. ⚠ Not the World Bank's copy of this series: comparing 2022 row for row, 26 of the 215 countries both carry differ, and Malta shows why — the FAO publishes 315.15 km² and the Bank publishes a round 320. Converted from the FAO's own unit of 1000 hectares by multiplying by ten, which is exact and loses no precision. ⚠ Land area, not surface area: FAOSTAT publishes both, and this is the one excluding lakes and rivers, which is the figure normally quoted as a country's size. Neither end is better and the FAO ranks nobody on it.
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