Dynamics And New Challenges In The Global Commodity Market

Global economy and particularly the world production of goods depends to a large extent on the supply of raw materials, of resource inputs extracted from the environment as well as an easy access to them. Commodities play an important part in the growth of global production and in the world trade in goods and services. The access to raw materials is vital for sustaining the productive capacity of the economy and also for satisfying domestic demand for industrial goods. On the other side, increasing demand for commodities and the need for assuring a sustainable supply pose great challenges on the world economy. The issue of raw materials supply represents a high-priority theme in the political agenda of the European Union. The Raw Materials Initiative launched in 2008 by the European Commission is based on three main pillars: - to ensure the access to raw materials on world market at undistorted conditions; - to foster sustainable supply of raw materials from European sources; - to reduce the EU's consumption of primary raw materials. (EC, 2008). To this end, EC has started to take action in order to ensure access to resources and avoid supply shortages. A great deal of attention is being paid to the study of recent developments in the global and particular commodity markets, taking into consideration fundamental aspects as supply concentration, governance of producing countries, the pressure of demand and its impact on prices, material's substitutability, stressing the role of resource consumption efficiency, recycling and substitution of vital raw materials and thus providing policy makers and industry with reliable information on how to efficiently manage resource inputs. This paper is dealing with the main developments which occurred during the past decade or so in the global commodity market, a major driver of the world economy, with particular reference to selected key-markets - as: aluminium, copper, nickel; cotton; corn, meat-swine, rice, wheat, soybeans; oil - emphasizing the issue of price volatility and new challenges in the market.