Commmittee on Commodity Foods and Commodity Products

Cellulase for commodity products from cellulosic biomass

A vital objective for second millennium biotechnology will be the enzymatic conversion of renewable cellulosic biomass to inexpensive fermentable sugars; new and more efficient fermentation processes will convert this biological 'currency' to a variety of commodity products. Although early strides will be made using process development and engineering disciplines, mid-term and longer advances m...

Commodity High Performance Computing at Commodity Prices

The entry price of supercomputing has traditionally been very high. As processing elements, operating systems, and switch technology become cheap commodity parts, building a powerful supercomputer at a fraction of the price of a proprietary system becomes realistic. We have recently purchased, in support of both our local and national collaborations, a dedicated computational cluster of eight D...

Commodity Prices, Commodity Currencies, and Global Economic Developments

In this paper, we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naïve statistical benchmarks. We revisit how well changes in commodity currencies perform as potential efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent literature. In addition, we consider different types of factor-augmented models that use information from a larg...

Commodity Prices and Growth∗

In this paper we propose an endogenous growth model of commodity-rich economies in which: (i) long-run (steady-state) growth is endogenous and yet independent of commodity prices; (ii) commodity prices affect short-run growth through transitional dynamics; and (iii) the status of net commodity importer/exporter is endogenous. We argue that these predictions are consistent with historical eviden...

Modelling Commodity