Agricultural Markets Instability

Since the financial and food price crises of 2007, market instability has been a topic of major concern to agricultural economists and policy professionals. This volume provides an overview of the key issues surrounding food prices volatility, focusing primarily on drivers, long-term implications of volatility and its impacts on food chains and consumers. The book explores which factors and drivers are volatility-increasing and which others are price level-increasing, and whether these two distinctive effects can be identified and measured. It considers the extent to which increasing instability affects agents in the value chain, as well as the actual impacts on the most vulnerable households in the EU and in selected developing countries. It also analyses which policies are more effective to avert and mitigate the effects of instability. Developed from the work of the European-based ULYSSES project, the book synthesises the most recent literature on the topic and presents the views of practitioners, businesses, NGOs and farmers' organizations. It draws policy responses and recommendations for policy makers at both European and on international levels.

World prices are notoriously unstable, and unless farmers can efficiently diffuse the risky returns from export crops, price variability may impede the expansion of agricultural exports in many developing countries.

Cerals; Animal feeds; Dairy products; The search for measures to limit instability; The effects of market instability; Implications of agricultural policies for market stability; Causes and effects of instability current functioning of the international cereal market.

This book argues that the viability of many observed market and non-market interventions in agricultural products worldwide depends considerably on the underlying behaviour of the relevant commodity markets. Many of these policies have had distortive impacts, resulting in much discussion and controversy in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round of trade negotiations.

Agricultural trade has become an integral part of world agriculture. During the 1970s, the real growth in world agricultural trade was phenomenal. For example, the value of U. S. agricultural exports alone increased more than fivefold during this period. In April, 1978, a small group of West Coast agricultural economists (Hillman, Josling, Sarris, Schmitz, King, and McCalla) met to form what is now called the International Trade Consortium which is financed, in part, by the U. S. Department of Agriculture and Agriculture Canada. One of the products of this project was a book published in 1979 by A. F. McCalla and T. E. Josling (editors), Imperfect Markets in Agricultural Trade, Allenheld, Osmun and Co., 1981. In the same vein, this book is a result of an International Trade Consortium meeting held in Berkeley, California, in the early 1980s.

"The conference was organized by the three editors of this book and took place on August 15-16, 2012 in Seattle."--Preface.

Growing interdependencies and uncertainties; Balancing overproduction and malnutrition; Pressure on natural resource; Human capital, technology and institution; People in rural societies; Food chain, markets, and trade; Structure of agriculture; Theoretical developments.

This book attempts to contribute to a fuller understanding of perennial issues underlying farm problems and agricultural policies in the United States thus contributing to better projections of policy effects, to better forecasts of policy changes, and perhaps to better policy for agriculture.