Accounting for biological assets: IAS 41

Abstract

In the absence of a specific accounting regulation for the evaluation of the assets of agricultural enterprises, the International Accounting Standard Board prepared the IAS 41 to cover all aspects related to agriculture. Thus, this regulation introduced a new method of evaluating of biological assets, the fair value. In this paper, a more in-depth analysis will be performed on the operation of the AS 41. The different assets regulated by this standard will be studied, as well as the differences generated with the Spanish accounting regulations. This paper will also analyze the different opinions created by the application of this method and the different alternative methods for the evaluation of assets when the fair value can not be reliably estimated. Also, different illustrative cases will be shown to see the impact of fair value on the evaluation of biological assets. These conclude that, although this method provides more reliable results than others, it can not always be used because of its inability to determine fair value reliably.