Growing demand for agricultural commodities is causing the expansion of agricultural frontiers onto native vegetation worldwide. Agribusiness companies linking these frontiers to distant spaces of consumption through global commodity chains increasingly make zero-deforestation pledges. However, production and land conversion are often carried out by less-visible local and regional actors that a...

oil prices may be having a direct and indirect effect through the exchange rate on the price of agricultural commodities. in this paper, the impact of world oil prices and exchange rate shocks on prices of specific agricultural commodities including wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers in iran is discussed. for this purpose, vector autoregressive model with monthly data over the period 2010-199...

The international prices of many agricultural commodities have increased significantly over the past two years. After falling sharply during the global financial crisis, the IMF Food Price Index has increased by 50 per cent since the end of 2008 and is now above its earlier peak in mid 2008. Supply disruptions have been an important factor behind the recent rise in the relative price of food, w...

As countries prepare to take decisions on the Biosafety Protocol’s (BSP) documentation requirements for shipments of living modified organisms (LMOs) intended for food, feed and processing (LMOs-FFP), many questions remain about the appropriate ways that the BSP might be implemented and about its potential impacts. Answers to these questions are particularly important for developing countries t...

About the Repor~ The purposes of this report are (1) to provide observations which may contribute to the Agricultural Sector Assessment by the Dominican Government; (2) to provide observations which may be helpful to the USAID Mission in assessing the agricultural marketing situation and related programs with emphasis on major commodities for domestic consumption;and (3) to suggest. elements of...

Giant? The Potentials and the Pitfalls1 In 2009 the World Bank published a report entitled Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond. The report highlights the agricultural potential of Africa’s Guinea Savannah (henceforth GS) zone, which it describes as “one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world” (p...

Agriculture provides commodities and has an influence on the environment. However, even if the value of agricultural production is easy to evaluate, it is difficult to estimate the efficiency of agricultural production at site level. Furthermore, the valuation of environmental impact is complex. Non-parametric approaches such as DEA allow for an estimation of environment and economic performanc...