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US retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in US biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by US farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil. That link, however, appears largely driven by common macroeconomic determinants of the prices of oil and of agricultural commodities rather than the pass-through from higher oil prices. We show that there is no evidence that corn ethanol mandates have created a tight link between oil and agricultural markets. Moreover, increases in agricultural commodity prices have contributed little to US retail food price increases, because of the small cost share of agricultural products in food prices. In short, there is no evidence that oil price shocks have been associated with more than a negligible increase in US retail food prices in recent years. Nor is there evidence for the prevailing wisdom that oil-price driven increases in the cost of food processing, packaging, transportation and distribution have been responsible for higher retail food prices. Similar results hold for other industrialized countries. There is reason, however, to expect food commodity prices to be more tightly linked to retail food prices in developing countries.

Agricultural economists helped develop farm programs to respond to the dire economic situation of the 1920s and 1930s. Some early authors appreciated that such policies created problems in markets for commodities and inputs. Over time, our understanding of agricultural issues and policies has deepened. Through the application of improved models and tools of analysis to more extensive data, we have developed better answers to old questions, and have responded to changing policy instruments, market contexts, and policy concerns. This article traces the evolution of our deepening economic understanding of the causes and consequences of agricultural policy.

That exchange rates strongly influence agricultural commodity prices is a widely held belief. Observed divergences in price and exchange rate correspondence over time, however, have occasionally brought this conventional wisdom into doubt. We empirically test and find evidence to support hypotheses that key supply-use factors, such as low stocks and policy shifts, intermittently cause greater responsiveness of agricultural commodity prices to exchange rate changes because they give rise to more inelastic market demand. After accounting for these longrun effects, we also find that short-run price responsiveness to exchange rate changes is sometimes greater due to overshooting factors.

Commercial agriculture in the United States is comprised of several hundred thousand farms, and these farms continue to become larger and fewer. The size of commercial farms is sometimes best-measured by sales, in other cases by acreage, and in still other cases by quantity produced of specific commodities, but for many commodities, size has doubled and doubled again in a generation. This article summarizes the economics of commercial agriculture in the United States, focusing on growth in farm size and other changes in size distribution in recent decades. I also consider the relationships between farm size distributions and farm productivity growth and farm subsidy policy.

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the past decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows caused a price bubble, we critically review academic studies through the perspective of how financial investors affect risk sharing and information discovery in commodity markets. We argue that financialization has substantially changed commodity markets through these mechanisms.

It is costly to learn about market conditions elsewhere, especially in developing countries. This paper examines how such information frictions affect trade. Using data on regional agricultural trade in the Philippines, I first document a number of observed patterns in trade flows and prices that suggest the presence of information frictions. I then incorporate information frictions into a perfect competition trade model by embedding a process whereby heterogeneous producers engage in a costly sequential search process to determine where to sell their produce. I show that introducing information frictions reconciles the theory with the observed patterns in the data. Structural estimation of the model finds that information frictions are quantitatively important: roughly half the observed regional price dispersion is due to information frictions. Furthermore, incorporating information frictions improves the out-of-sample predictive power of the model.

Recent years have seen considerable interest in the impact of contract farming on farmers in developing countries, motivated out of belief that contract farming spurs transition to modern agriculture. In this article, we provide a thorough review of the empirical literature on contract farming in both developed and developing countries, using China as a special case of the latter. We pay careful attention to broad implications of this research for economic development. We first find empirical studies consistently support the positive contribution of contract farming to production and supply chain efficiency. We also find that most empirical studies identify a positive and significant effect of contract farming on farmer welfare, yet are often unable to reach consistent conclusions as to significant correlates of contract participation.

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970-2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990-2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.

We examine the performance of liquidity proxies in commodities. The Amihud measure has the largest correlation with liquidity benchmarks. Amivest and Effective Tick measures also perform well. These proxies are useful for studies of commodity liquidity over a long time period and those that lack access to high-frequency data. We use various aspects of transaction costs, such as spread, depth, immediacy, and resiliency, to give insight into the costs of different execution approaches. Transaction costs increase with volatility and exhibit mean reversion. Splitting trades over one hour can reduce trading costs by two-thirds compared to an immediate execution.

Digital platforms for buying and selling agricultural commodities have generated significant interest in the trade literature as a way to link rural communities to the Internet. Yet, the extent to which these digital platforms actually translate into higher commodity prices for producers remains an open research question. We investigate this question by comparing transaction data on trading various grades of coffee from a recently implemented digital platform in India with similar transactions from a physical commodity auction held weekly, and farm-gate prices in the coffee producing regions of India. Although the digital platform prices closely track the physical commodity auction prices, producers obtain significantly higher prices when they sell the commodity through the digital platform rather than at the farm-gate through brokers who operate in their regions. However, coffee grades with higher price volatility and premium coffee grades that require face-to-face interactions to verify quality obtain lower prices on the digital platform. Our results also indicate that market participants who control the transaction obtain better prices. We discuss the implications of our findings for governments and platform providers.