The elemental power of food politics has not been fully appraised. Food marketing and consumption were matters of politics as much as economics as England became a market society. In times of dearth, ...concatenations of food riots, repression, and relief created a maturing politics of provisions. Over three centuries, some eight hundred riots crackled in waves across England. Crowds seized wagons, attacked mills and granaries, and lowered prices in marketplaces or farmyards. Sometimes rioters parleyed with magistrates. More often both acted out a well-rehearsed political minuet that evolved from Tudor risings and state policies down to a complex culmination during the Napoleonic Wars.
'Provision politics' thus comprised both customary negotiations over scarcity and hunger, and 'negotiations' of the social vessel through the turbulence of dearth. Occasionally troops killed rioters, or judges condemned them to the gallows, but increasingly riots prompted wealthy citizens to procure relief supplies. In short, food riots worked: in a sense they were a first draft of the welfare state.
This pioneering analysis connects a generation of social protest studies spawned by E.P. Thompson's essay on the 'moral economy' with new work on economic history and state formation. The dynamics of provision politics that emerged during England's social, economic and political transformations should furnish fruitful models for analyses of 'total war' and famine as well as broader transitions elsewhere in world history.
•We estimate the food price pass through from global to local consumer prices in 147 countries.•The main determinant of variation in the food price pass through is income per capita.•The findings ...reflect variation in the importance of primary food in consumed food.•Trade policy measures of market integration also affect the pass through significantly.
World food prices spiked in the periods 2007–8 and 2010–11. The impact of these spikes in world food prices on local food prices and thus on local consumers is determined by the food price pass through. Pass through is defined as the extent to which changes in world food prices lead to changes in local food prices. We examine the determinants of variation in food price pass through from global to local consumer prices in a global sample of 147 countries, using FAO data on world food prices and ILO data on food prices for consumers. While market integration matters, our study finds that income per capita is the dominant factor explaining cross-country variation in pass through of food prices. We estimate an elasticity of about −0.3 of pass through with respect to income per capita. This means far greater price transmission of food price shocks at the commodity level to final consumers in low-income countries than in high-income countries. The implication is that future swings in world food prices will in particular jeopardize food security in poor countries. Trade policy measures of market integration also affect the pass through significantly, whereas infrastructure and geography measures play no significant role.
The research explores the dynamic relationship between global crude oil price and food price indices on a sample of monthly data spanning from January 1990 to June 2017 within a nonlinear framework. ...Linear methods are applied first to examine the stationarity, co-integration and linear Granger causality of the variables of crude oil and food price indices. Moreover, a series of nonlinear tests are used to detect the nonlinearity of the univariate and oil-food prices link. Finally, the asymmetric adjustment analyses are made to understand the dynamic vary mechanism depending on the considered regime of the threshold vector autoregressive model (TVAR), and the threshold vector error correction model (TVECM) is integrated to check how the variables respond to the deviations from the equilibrium. The findings of systematic tests and analyses confirm the fact that there is a nonlinear causal relationship between global crude oil and food price indices. The co-movement of crude oil and food price has obvious structural break features, which is relevant to the underlying regime. Furthermore, the results also show that the adjustment process of the food price indices towards equilibrium is highly persistent and grows faster than oil price when a threshold is reached.
•A new framework is proposed to analyze the volatility spillover effect.•We prove that the relationship between the two is nonlinear and asymmetric.•In TVAR model, the relationship between the two is reversed in different regimes.•In the TVECM model, only the ECT is significant in the food equation of regime 2.
•Income convergence embodied in the widely used economic projections increases world food demand to 2050 by about a third.•Higher rates of convergence increase food demand by more than supply, ...resulting in upward pressure on world food prices.•Resource-cost measures capture the agricultural effort needed to meet food demand better than those of calories consumed.•Per capita food demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand to 2050 than population growth.
In recent years, developing countries have been growing much more rapidly than the industrial countries. This growth convergence has potentially very important implications for world food demand and for world agriculture because of the increase in demand for agricultural resources as diets shift away from starchy staples and towards animal-based products and fruits and vegetables. Using a resource-based measure of food production and consumption that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with animal-based foods, this article finds per capita demand growth to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050. Using the middle-ground Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenario to 2050 from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which assumes continued income convergence, the article finds that the increase in food demand (102 percent) would be about a third greater than under a hypothetical scenario of all countries growing at the same rate (78 percent). As convergence increases the growth of food supply by less than demand, it appears to be a driver of upward pressure on world food prices.
•We analyze empirically the drivers of food price spikes and volatility.•Supply and demand fundamentals and speculation are significant drivers.•Financial crises increase food price ...volatility.•Speculation had a strong impact on maize and soybean price spikes in 2007/2008.•Food price volatility is increasingly affected by energy markets.
The objective of this study is to explore empirical evidence on the quantitative importance of supply, demand, and market shocks for price changes in international food commodity markets. To this end, it distinguishes between root, conditional, and internal drivers of price changes using three empirical models: (1) a price spike model where monthly food price returns (spikes) are estimated against oil prices, supply and demand shocks, and excessive speculative activity; (2) a volatility model where annualized monthly variability of food prices is estimated against the same set of variables plus a financial crises index; and (3) a trigger model that estimates extreme values of price spikes and volatility using quantile regressions. The results point to the increasing linkages among food, energy, and financial markets, which explain much of the observed food price spikes and volatility. While financial speculation amplifies short-term price spikes, oil price volatility intensifies medium-term price volatility.
This paper summarizes the main findings of alternative lines of research on the relationship between the food and fuel markets and identifies gaps and quandaries that warrant further research. This ...is not meant to be a complete survey, and it emphasizes several of our studies within the broader literature. The paper distinguishes between two bodies of literature: one on the relationship between food and fuel prices and another on the impact of the introduction of biofuel on commodity food prices. While biofuel prices do not seem to affect food-commodity prices, we explain why the introduction of biofuel does. Moreover, biofuels have not been the most dominant contributor to the recent food-price inflation and different biofuels have different impacts. Reprinted by permission of the American Agricultural Economics Association
•Relationship between prices of fuel and food, industrial inputs, metals, beverages is analysed.•We use the wavelet coherency and phase-differences.•We use the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) & Barunik and ...Krehlik (2017) spillover methods.•The agriculture sector is the most affected by shocks from other markets.•Industrial inputs at all frequencies appear to be the main source of volatility transmission.
This study analyzes the lead-lag relationship between the price indices of energy fuels and each of food, industrial inputs, agriculture raw materials, metals and beverages in the time-frequency domain. To this end, we first use the wavelet coherency and phase-differences. Next, we use the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and Barunik and Krehlik (2017) spillover indices to analyse the connectedness among the set of the price indices under consideration. The period of the study is 1990m1 to 2017m5. The wavelet coherency results reveal that there are important and significant relations between the fuel and food prices, the fuel and industrial prices, and the fuel and metal prices. These results also show that there are phase relationships between those paired prices. The volatility spillover results indicate that the agricultural sector is the most affected by shocks from the other markets. The return series of the industrial input prices at all frequencies appears to be the main source of volatility transmission to the prices of the other commodities over the whole period. This finding underlines the relevance of the industrial inputs to policy makers, particularly when they design policies to provide incentives related to industrial production.
This study examines the linkages between energy price and food prices over the period 2000–2016 by using a Panel-VAR model in the case of eight Asian economies. Our results confirm that energy price ...(oil price) has a significant impact on food prices. According to the results of impulse response functions, agricultural food prices respond positively to any shock from oil prices. Our results show that there is a linkage between energy and food security through price volatility. Since inflation in oil price is harmful for food security, it would be necessary to diversify the energy consumption in this sector, from too much reliance on fossil fuels to an optimal combination of renewable and nonrenewable energy resources that will be in favor of not only the energy security by also the food security. In addition, the paper found that the impact of biofuel prices on food prices is statistically significant but explains less than 2% of the food price variance. However, by increasing the demand for biofuel, there should be more concern about the global increase in agricultural commodities prices and endangering food security, especially in vulnerable economies.
•Energy price (oil price) has a significant impact on food prices.•Agricultural food prices respond positively to any shock from oil prices.•Results show, 64.17% of food price variance is explained by oil price movement.•Inflation in oil price is harmful for energy security and threatening food security.•It’s necessary to diversify the energy consumption in agricultural sector.
•Nonlinear dependence dynamics and tail risk spillovers between oil and food prices are examined.•Static and dynamic bivariate copulas, Value-at-Risk (VaR) and conditional VaR (CoVaR) methods are ...used.•Lower and upper tail dependence is observed between oil prices and the prices of cereals, vegetable oil, and sugar.•We identify upside and downside asymmetric risk spillovers from individual food commodities to oil and vice versa.•Oil prices most strongly affect by sugar and vegetable oil prices (downside and upside).
We examine the nonlinear dependence dynamics and downside and upside risk spillovers between oil prices and world food prices captured by a world food price index and its subcategories of dairy, cereals, vegetable oil, and sugar. We draw our empirical results using static and dynamic bivariate copulas, Value-at-Risk (VaR) and conditional VaR (CoVaR) methods. Our empirical findings reveal that oil prices and aggregate food prices, as measured by the world food price index, independently move during market upturns and downturns. However, lower and upper tail dependence is observed between oil prices and cereals, vegetable oil, and sugar prices. We also identify upside and downside asymmetric risk spillovers from individual food commodities to oil and from oil to food commodities. Oil prices most strongly affect sugar and vegetable oil prices (downside and upside) whereas oil prices are most strongly impacted in the downside and upside by vegetable oil and sugar prices, respectively. The implications of the results are discussed.
The growing literature on volatility spillover and shock transfer between energy and food prices largely ignored the nonlinearities in the volatility patterns. This study evaluates the nonlinear ...interaction and co-movement between world energy prices and world food prices, including their individual components. Using monthly data from 1992 to 2017, we used Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) to investigate the short-term and long-term dynamics of food prices concerning the positive and negative shocks in energy prices. The result indicates that the impact of energy prices on food prices is asymmetric. A positive change in energy prices has a higher and long-lasting effect on agriculture commodity than a negative change. The wavelet coherence analysis suggests that a statistically significant lead-lag relationship exists. Both wheat and corn prices lead by energy prices. The relationship is rather long-run than the short-run, as we find the most dominant frequency is the 16th month and remains positive until the 64th month. Interestingly, we also observe that in the long-run, rice price lead oil and coal price. For the robustness test, we consider fertilizer and diesel as the control variables and find a similar asymmetric relationship with food prices.
•The relationship between energy prices and food prices is nonlinear and asymmetric.•In the short run, food prices are only affected by positive changes in energy prices.•In the long run, both positive and negative changes in energy prices impact food prices.•An increase in energy prices have a higher and long-lasting effect on food prices than a decrease.•Energy prices lead wheat and corn price by 16 months.
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