New baseline food and agricultural outlook report
Farm commodity prices have tumbled from the peak levels they rose to during spring 2022—and new projections suggest that downward pressure on prices could continue throughout 2024 and beyond.
Farm commodity prices have tumbled from the peak levels they rose to during spring 2022—and new projections suggest that downward pressure on prices could continue throughout 2024 and beyond.
Economics & Business
Mar 19, 2024
0
11
Indonesia, the world's second-largest seaweed producer, plans to introduce a nationwide export ban on seaweed, following a ban at a provincial level in 2022.
Ecology
Feb 5, 2024
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30
Search-and-rescue operations of boats carrying migrants across the central Mediterranean Sea did not appear to affect the rate of crossing attempts between 2011 and 2020, according to a modeling study published in Scientific ...
Social Sciences
Aug 3, 2023
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65
Although more than enough food is produced to feed everyone in the world, as many as 828 million people face hunger today. Poverty, social inequity, climate change, natural disasters, and political conflicts all contribute ...
Economics & Business
Jul 17, 2023
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11
The federal government has announced a new round of strategic water buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. The government intends to purchase water entitlements from voluntary sellers in parts of New South Wales and Queensland.
Earth Sciences
Feb 24, 2023
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3
Food prices in the U.K. are at their highest for 15 years and something similar is happening in almost every country around the world.
Economics & Business
Feb 7, 2023
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12
The world's demand for natural gas is set to decline slightly in 2022 as a result of higher prices and market disruptions caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to the International Energy Agency's latest quarterly ...
Economics & Business
Apr 15, 2022
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9
U.S. agricultural systems are world leaders in the production of food, fuel and fiber. This high level of production enables U.S. consumers to spend an average of only 8.6 percent of their disposable income on food, a percentage ...
Economics & Business
Mar 1, 2022
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5
A new, location-specific agricultural greenhouse gas emission study is the first to account for net carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from all subsectors related to food production and consumption. The work, ...
Environment
Sep 13, 2021
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123
Researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute (Somerville and Seattle, U.S.) and Earth Track, Inc. (Cambridge, MA, U.S.) examined 16 subsidies and environmental regulatory exemptions, providing one of the first estimates ...
Environment
Jul 29, 2021
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90
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services.
The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats it as equivalent or nearly so no matter who produces it. Petroleum and copper are examples of such commodites. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Items such as stereo systems, on the other hand, have many aspects of product differentiation, such as the brand, the user interface, the perceived quality etc. And, the more valuable a stereo is perceived to be, the more it will cost.
In contrast, one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminium, copper, rice, wheat, gold, silver, palladium, and platinum. Soft commodities are goods that are grown, while hard commodities are the ones that are extracted through mining.
There is another important class of energy commodities which includes electricity, gas, coal and oil. Electricity has the particular characteristic that it is either impossible or uneconomical to store, hence, electricity must be consumed as soon as it is produced.
Commoditization (also called commodification) occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.
There is a spectrum of commodification, rather than a binary distinction of "commodity versus differentiable product". Few products have complete undifferentiability and hence fungibility; even electricity can be differentiated in the market based on its method of generation (e.g., fossil fuel, wind, solar). Many products' degree of commodification depends on the buyer's mentality and means. For example, milk, eggs, and notebook paper are considered by many customers as completely undifferentiable and fungible; lowest price is the only deciding factor in the purchasing choice. Other customers take into consideration other factors besides price, such as environmental sustainability and animal welfare. To these customers, distinctions such as organic-versus-not or cage-free-versus-not count toward differentiating brands of milk or eggs, and percentage of recycled content or forestry council certification count toward differentiating brands of notebook paper. Larger considerations can enter these equations, such as systemic socioeconomic unfairness (as poor people point out, "sure, it's easy to buy the expensive food when you've got plenty of money") and deception and authentication (e.g., a brand may greenwash its product and consumers lack practical ways to authenticate the claims).
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA