Corn ethanol plants consume large amounts of corn and their location has the potential to alter local crop prices and surrounding agricultural land values. The relationship between ethanol plant location and agricultural land prices is examined using data obtained from the Agricultural Credit Survey administered by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The findings indicate that the portion ...

European cattle markets have recently undergone significant change. We explore the simultaneous impacts of agricultural policy reform and the occurrence of an animal health crisis on spatial interdependencies of calf prices of four major European Union markets. The markets are found to be integrated. Price shocks are rapidly absorbed. We find that the member state specific implementations of th...

Trade and food security discussions have changed significantly in recent years, reflecting a more general change in perspective on “the right price of food” (Swinnen 2011). Until 2007 the dominant view was that low prices for agricultural products were causing poverty and food insecurity among poor households in developing countries. Trade policy discussions emphasized the importance of reducin...

During the early 1980s, U.S. agriculture underwent its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in spite of record spending on government agricultural programs. In this chapter we test the hypothesis that the severity of the crisis may have been moderated if agricultural policy had been more flexible. Prior to the 1985 Farm Bill (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1986), agricultural polic...

For most of the past fifty years, real agricultural commodity prices followed a downward trend punctuated by short-lived peaks that were not matched by equally pronounced and short-lived price falls but rather were separated by extended price troughs. Since 2000 it appears that prices have departed from their long-term downward trend and have become increasingly volatile (Figure 1). Prices incr...

Recent years have seen a resurgent interest in large scale input subsidies, and particularly fertilizer subsidies, in agricultural development and food security policies in Africa. Very high global grain prices in the first part of 2008 appeared to make such subsidies even more attractive, but this was complicated by even more dramatic rises in fertilizer prices. Global grain and fertiliser pri...