The recent soaring cost of many basic foods worldwide has forced a new focus on many areas of policy and in Europe the issue of genetically modified crops has attracted renewed media and wider interest. The reason is that the European Union has proved resistant to almost all perceived or promoted advantages of GM crops. Environmental groups opposed to the technology gained early advantage becau...

The commodity markets have been bidding for acreage due to biofuels creating increased demand for corn and soybeans. Currently, the major decision facing producers is determining the enterprise mix for 2008 in the midst of higher commodity prices. This memo compares the Return over Variable Costs for cotton and peanuts and analyzes the breakeven yields and prices for non-irrigated and irrigated...

W consider a firm that procures and distributes a commodity from spot and forward markets under randomly fluctuating prices; the commodity is distributed downstream to a set of nonhomogeneous retailers to satisfy random demand. We formulate a model that allows one to compute approximate, but near optimal, procurement and distribution policies for this system, and we explore the value of the com...

Commodity loans are presented as an interpretation of spreads between spot and futures prices in commodity markets. This interpretation suggests an alternative to convenience yield as an explanation for the existence of large positive differences between spot and futures prices that are inconsistent with the usual arbitrage arguments. A model is presented in which an owner of a stock of a commo...