The Economics Of Food Price Volatility

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

This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

There has been an increase in food price instability in recent years, with varied consequences for farmers, market participants, and consumers. Before policy makers can design schemes to reduce food price uncertainty or ameliorate its effects, they must first understand the factors that have contributed to recent price instability. Does it arise primarily from technological or weather-related supply shocks, or from changes in demand like those induced by the growing use of biofuel? Does financial speculation affect food price volatility? The researchers who contributed to The Economics of Food Price Volatility address these and other questions. They examine the forces driving both recent and historical patterns in food price volatility, as well as the effects of various public policies in affecting this volatility. The chapters include studies of the links between food and energy markets, the impact of biofuel policy on the level and variability of food prices, and the effects of weather-related disruptions in supply. The findings shed light on the way price volatility affects the welfare of farmers, traders, and consumers.

Since 2006, global food prices have fluctuated greatly around an increasing trend and price spikes were observed for key food commodities such as rice, wheat, and maize.

The recent global financial crisis exposed the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models. Not only did macro models fail to predict the crisis, they seemed incapable of explaining what was happening to the economy. Policymakers felt abandoned by the conventional tools of the now obsolete Washington consensus and the World Trade Organization’s oversimplified faith in free markets.The traditional models for agricultural commodities have so far failed to take into account the uncertain character of the global agricultural economy and its ferocious consequences in food price volatility, the worst in 300 years, yielding hunger riots throughout the world. This book explores the elements which could help to close this fundamental modeling gap. To what extent should traditional models be questioned regarding agricultural commodities? Are prices on these markets foreseeable? Can their evolution be either predicted or convincingly simulated, and if so, by which methods and models? Presenting contributions from acknowledged experts from several countries and backgrounds – professors at major international universities or researchers within specialized international organizations – the book concentrates on four issues: the role of expectations and capacity of prediction; policy issues related to development strategies and food security; the role of hoarding and speculation and finally, global modeling methods. The book offers a renewed wisdom on some of the core issues in the world economy today and puts forward important innovations in analyzing these core issues, among which the modular modeling design, the Momagri model being a seminal example of it. Reading this book should inspire fruitful revisions in policy-making to improve the welfare of populations worldwide.

This book examines the issue of price volatility in agricultural commodities markets and how this phenomenon has evolved in recent years. The factors underlying the price spike of 2007-08 appear to be global and macroeconomic in nature, including the rapid growth in demand by developing countries, the international financial crisis, and exchange rate movements. Some of these factors are new, appearing as influences on price volatility only in the last decade. Although volatility has always been a feature of agricultural commodity markets, the evidence suggests that volatility has increased in certain commodity markets. A growing problem is that agricultural price shocks and volatility disrupt agricultural markets, economic incentives and incomes. With increased globalization and integration of financial and energy markets with agricultural commodity markets, the relationships between markets are expanding and becoming more complex. When a crisis such as a regional drought, food safety scare or a financial crisis hits a particular market, policy-makers often do not know the extent to which it will impact on other markets and affect producer, consumer and trader decisions. Including contributions from experts at the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the USDA, and the European Commission, the research developed throughout the chapters of this book is based on current methodologies that can be used to analyze price volatility and provide directions for understanding this volatility and the development of new agricultural policies. The book highlights the challenges facing policy makers in dealing with the changing nature of agricultural commodities markets, and offers recommendations for anticipating price movements and managing their consequences. It will be a practical guide for both present and future policy-makers in deciding on potential price-stabilizing interventions, and will also serve as a useful resource for researchers and students in agricultural economics.

The macroeconomic effects of large food price swings can be broad and far-reaching, including the balance of payments of importers and exporters, budgets, inflation, and poverty. For market participants and policymakers, managing low frequency volatility—i.e., the component of volatility that persists for longer than one harvest year—may be more challenging as uncertainty regarding its persistence is likely to be higher. This paper measures the low frequency volatility of food commodity spot prices using the spline- GARCH approach. It finds that low frequency volatility is positively correlated across different commodities, suggesting an important role for common factors. It also identifies a number of determinants of low frequency volatility, two of which—the variation in U.S. inflation and the U.S. dollar exchange rate—explain a relatively large part of the rise in volatility since the mid-1990s.

This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.