Food Prices, Ethics and Forms of Speculation

Food Speculation

Speculation on commodities futures markets and destabilization of global food prices: exploring the connections.

In December 2010, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index surpassed its previous peak of June 2008, and prices remained at this level through September 2011. This pattern is creating justified fears of a renewal or intensification of the global food crisis. This paper reviews arguments and evidence to inform debates on how to regulate commodity futures markets in...

Food price volatility and financial speculation

Pass-Through Effects of Global Food Prices on Consumer Prices in Iran

T he objective of this study is using the Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive method and regime dependent impulse response functions to measure the pass-through of world food prices to consumer price index in Iran from 1990 to 2013. With respect to information criteria and the log-likelihood ratio statistic, MSIA(2)-VAR(1) model has a better fit to data than other models. The magn...

Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices

The paper summarizes key findings of alternative lines of research on the relationship between food and fuel markets, and identifies gaps between two bodies of literature: one that investigates the relationship between food and fuel prices, and another that investigates the impact of the introduction of biofuels on commodity-food prices. The former body of literature suggests that biofuel price...