In six months, one pair of mice can eat more than two kilograms (4 lbs.) of food and deposit about 18,000 droppings. Food contaminated by mice is about ten times greater than what is eaten. Also, food wasted by mouse nibbling is much more than what is eaten. So common are mice, that it is no wonder their hairs and sometimes droppings, end up in all types of food commodities, from canned beans t...

guided by the principle that Americans should not be hungry or malnourished because they cannot afford a nutritious diet. Food assistance programs help to provide food and meet nutritional requirements for individuals and households that are vulnerable due to low income or other circumstances. Originally initiated in the early 1930s, with the primary objective to dispose of surplus agricultural...

In this paper, we evaluate the downside risk of six major agricultural commodities – corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean meal, oil and oats. For research purposes, first use an optimal generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model to create residuals, which later for measuring risks via parametric semiparametric approaches. Modified value-at-risk (mVaR) modified (mCVaR) pro...

Many commentators have speculated that agricultural policies have contributed to increased obesity rates in the United States, yet such claims are often made without any analysis of the complex links between real-world farm commodity support programs, prices and consumption of foods, and caloric intake. This article carefully studies the effects of US agricultural policies on prices and quantit...

South Asia is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. Home to approximately 1.3 billion of the world's population, the region's GDP growth rate of 5.6 per cent in 1990-2000 surpassed the world average of 2.6 per cent, second only to East and Southeast Asia at 7.0 per cent (The World Bank, 2004). During 1980-2000, the GDP per capita in South Asia grew at a rate of 3.3 per cent per annum...

In this paper, we used several elaborate return-to-risk methods to investigate the risk-adjusted performances of five soft commodities. Regarding only level risk, found that cocoa had highest risk losses, followed by orange juice. Cotton and coffee lowest losses. However, according output, cotton was worst asset in which invest because it negative average returns. contradistinction, sugar a rel...

Mycotoxins contaminate both raw agricultural commodities and processed food. As the world food exporter, Thailand has to be aware of food safety. Both international and local publications of major mycotoxins contamination of food in Thailand published from 20002010 were reviewed. A wide range of contamination levels were found. In Thailand, regulatory limit has been set only for aflatoxins. Glo...