IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/diw/diwwrp/wr4-12.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Causes and Consequences of Rising Food Prices

Author

Listed:
  • Georg Erber
  • Martin Petrick
  • Vanessa von Schlippenbach

Abstract

Since mid 2007 there has been a dramatic rise in prices for basic foods such as internationally traded varieties of rice, corn and wheat. At the moment, it is rather impossible to estimate how far speculation in the commodity markets has contributed to this development. Irrespective of this, a long-term solution to present and future supply shortfalls, including investment in more efficient agro-technologies and infrastructures is required. This is a matter for the international community which should continue to promote the abolition of international trade barriers in the agricultural sector in addition to local measures to provide structural aid. Hoped-for structural change may however be impeded if agricultural producers are exposed both to the market power of trader demand and the supplier power of upstream suppliers. It therefore appears that controls on abuse of market power at an international level are urgently required in order to increase the efficiency of agricultural markets and ultimately to secure the food supply.

Suggested Citation

  • Georg Erber & Martin Petrick & Vanessa von Schlippenbach, 2008. "Causes and Consequences of Rising Food Prices," Weekly Report, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 4(12), pages 73-79.
    • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwwrp:wr4-12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.91486.de/diw_wr_2008-12.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Noisetraders; Trade liberalization; Vertical relations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • L4 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies
    • Q11 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Aggregate Supply and Demand Analysis; Prices
    • Q17 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agriculture in International Trade

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:diw:diwwrp:wr4-12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diwbede.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.