The global literature widely uses Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), Lafay Index (LFI), Export Diversification (EDI), Hirschman (HI), and Major Category (MEC) to analyze international trade flows, though agricultural trade, specifically agri-food commodities consisting of food feed commodities, is neglected in empirical works. Furthermore, the determinants Advantages have received little att...

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...

Despite decades of support for international food assistance programs by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Food for Peace, relatively little is known about the commodity pipeline and management issues these programs face in post-conflict and politically volatile settings. Based on an audit of the program's commodity tracking system and interviews with 13 key progra...

There are three dominant globalization pathways affecting noncommunicable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): urbanization, trade liberalization, and investment liberalization. Urbanization carries potential health benefits due to improved access to an increased variety of food imports, although for the growing number of urban poor, this has often meant increased reliance on cheap, highly pro...

The problems of developing country dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports are well-established. Many poorer developing countries have continued to generate a substantial proportion of their total export revenues from one or a small number of basic food commodities. In addition to the problem of declining world market prices for basic food products typically exported from developing c...

The prevalence of reciprocal cooperation in non-human animals is hotly debated [1, 2]. Part of this dispute rests on the assumption that reciprocity means paying like with like [3]. However, exchanges between social partners may involve different commodities and services. Hitherto, there is no experimental evidence that animals other than primates exchange different commodities among conspecifi...

Recent human population increase has been enabled by a massive expansion of global agricultural production. A key component of this "Green Revolution" has been application of inorganic fertilizers to produce and maintain high crop yields. However, the long-term sustainability of these practices is unclear given the eutrophying effects of fertilizer runoff as well as the reliance of fertilizer p...