We use the well known USDA dataset of real exchange rates to address the question of whether PPP holds for agricultural commodities. Both unit root tests and the recently proposed more powerful class of panel unit root tests, which take into account cross-section correlation across the units in the panel, are used. Properties of unit roots and panel tests are analyzed by Monte Carlo simulation....

Recent human population increase has been enabled by a massive expansion of global agricultural production. A key component of this "Green Revolution" has been application of inorganic fertilizers to produce and maintain high crop yields. However, the long-term sustainability of these practices is unclear given the eutrophying effects of fertilizer runoff as well as the reliance of fertilizer p...

Aflatoxin-contaminated commodities can be detoxified by a variety of methods based to some extent on economics and the physical and chemical characteristics of the substance being treated. Electronic and hand sorting of peanuts with ammoniation of contaminated oilseed meals and corn currently appears to offer the most promise. Microbiological decontamination appears to be the least feasible met...

We develop and implement a model for a profit maximizing firm that provides an intermediation service between commodity producers and commodity end-users distributed over a realistic spatial network. Producers and end-users trade with the firm through contracts for delivery of grain during the marketing season. The firm begins the marketing season with a portfolio of prearranged purchase and sa...

We forecast the realized and median volatility of agricultural commodities using variants heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model. obtain tick-by-tick data on five widely-traded (corn, rough rice, soybeans, sugar, wheat) from CME/ICE. Real out-of-sample forecasts are produced for between 1 66 days ahead. Our in-sample analysis shows that HAR model which decompose measures into their continuous...

Farmers as the earliest stage in supply chain networks are usually weak and have no bargaining power in commodities pricing, because the commodities availability depends on season and has a very high potential for damage before be processed into specific products. So the price of agricultural commodities has a very high risk of fluctuations compared to the price of a finished product. As the fa...

Many new technologies involving agricultural commodities will not be final consumer products, rather they will be inputs into the manufacture of other products. The new technologies may be new manufacturing processes (to accommodate a new raw material), or intermediate products that will be used in the production of other products (e.g., plastics are used to manufacture final consumer products)...

abstract in this paper an attempt is made to determine the most suitable agricultural commodities to be adopted for establishing a futures market in iran. two different approaches are adopted: the first involves identifying factors that contribute significantly to the success or failure of existing agricultural commodities futures contracts in established futures markets. the second involves si...