Agricultural Commodity Prices Research Articles

The time-varying dynamic impact of US renewable energy prices on agricultural prices in China: the case of fuel ethanol.

This paper intends to look into the time-varying dynamic impact of US fuel ethanol, one of the renewable energy sources, on the prices of agricultural products (specifically corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat) in China based on monthly price data from January 2000 to January 2023. To achieve this, a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model is employed, which takes into account structural changes in emergencies through time-varying parameters. The empirical results show that the equal-interval impulse responses of price fluctuations in agricultural commodities are primarily positive to variations in fuel ethanol prices and production. And the intensity and direction of the effects vary at distinct time lags. Additionally, the magnitude of these responses is most pronounced in the short term for all agricultural commodities except for corn, and the duration of the impulse responses at different time points is generally longer for corn prices compared to other commodities. The study also reveals that the influence of US fuel ethanol on Chinese agricultural commodity prices is not substantial on the whole. Therefore, there is a necessity to advance the growth of biofuels and provide policy support and financial subsidies for agricultural products earmarked for food production. These actions could shed insights into the progression of Chinese renewable energy and food policies, ensuring the stability of the market in the long run.

Comparative Study of EMD based Modelling Techniques for Improved Agricultural Price Forecasting

Forecasting agricultural commodity prices is regarded as a challenging task due to its non-linear and non-stationary nature. As agriculture productionis highly reliant on various biological and agro-meteorological factors, traditional smoothing techniques as well as statistical models often fail tomodel such series satisfactorily. To capture such complex patterns effectively, different data-driven and self-adaptive techniques have been developedtime-to-time. Against this backdrop, in this paper, we have assessed the suitability of empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-based neural network andsupport vector regression (SVR) approaches for forecasting wholesale prices of three major potato markets namely, Agra, Bangalore, and Mumbai.As the benchmark models, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), time delay neural network (TDNN) and SVR models have beenemployed for the comparative evaluation. The experimental results clearly reveal the comparative superiority of the EMD-SVR model for the Agraand Bangalore markets and the EMD-TDNN model for the Mumbai market in terms of root mean squared error values and turning point predictions.Moreover, all the EMD-based models have performed better than the other competing models.

Potential climate-induced impacts on trade: the case of agricultural commodities and maritime chokepoints

This study assesses the potential macro-economic effects of climate change affecting operations in three maritime chokepoints, i.e., the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, and the Turkish Straits. The analysis focuses on agricultural commodities. It couples a “logistics” model of maritime trade flows with a Computable General Equilibrium model considering three modelling alternatives: (1) increase of “iceberg trade costs”, (2) shadow import tariffs, and (3) shadow export tariffs. Methodologically, we found a comforting qualitative agreement across methodologies in predicting the direction of changes in the main economic variables under scrutiny. However, negative GDP performances are more frequent and larger using the first method that also tends to predict lower import contractions than the other two methods. The impact assessment, examining storylines of climate-change-induced events delaying chokepoints operations, highlights that climate change impacts on chokepoints’ operations can convey detectable effects on production and prices of agricultural commodities associated with negative GDP impacts worldwide. In addition, although trade re-composition generates winners and losers, total losses tend to prevail. The combined GDP losses of the three chokepoints can reach $34 billion (2014 prices) in 2030. It shows that weather events in remote locations, such as the Panama Canal, can have cascading effects on the EU, with potential losses of USD 2 billion $ in GDP. North Africa, Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly vulnerable. They suffer from a drop in imports of agricultural commodities and GDP losses in all the three cases. This impact assessment emphasizes another mechanism at play that could increase the asymmetry and the adverse distributional impacts of climate change on agriculture.

Impacts of commodity prices and governance on the expansion of tropical agricultural frontiers

Deforestation in the tropics remains a significant global challenge linked to carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Agriculture, forestry, wildfires, and urbanization have been repeatedly identified as main drivers of tropical deforestation. Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind these direct causes is crucial to navigate the multiple tradeoffs between competing forest uses, such as food and biomass production (SDG 2), climate action (SDG 13), and life on land (SDG 15). This paper develops and implements a global-scale empirical approach to quantify two key factors affecting land use decisions at tropical forest frontiers: agricultural commodity prices and national governance. It relies on data covering the period 2004–2015 from multiple public sources, aggregated to countries and agro-ecological zones. Our analysis confirms the persistent influence of commodity prices on agricultural land expansion, especially in forest-abundant regions. Economic and environmental governance quality co-determines processes of expansion and contraction of agricultural land in the tropics, yet at much smaller magnitudes than other drivers. We derive land supply elasticities for direct use in standard economic impact assessment models and demonstrate that our results make a difference in a Computable General Equilibrium framework.

Early forecasting of corn yield and price variations using satellite vegetation products

Several approaches based on process-based, statistical or economic models have been developed and are currently used by market analysts and governmental agencies to forecast agricultural yields and commodity prices at the national and global scales. However, these models require input data that are often difficult to obtain before crop harvest and their predictions are not always reliable. Satellite data products provide easily accessible sources of information on vegetation characteristics, potentially relevant for predicting crop yield and commodity prices at a large scale, before harvest. This study presents and evaluates several methods for forecasting variations in US corn yield and global corn prices using regional vegetation satellite products. The spatial dimension of maps of vegetation indices derived from satellite products in the US Corn Belt is first reduced either by their spatial means or by principal components derived using the Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) method. Mean values and EOF principal components are then used as explanatory variables in generalized LASSO linear models to forecast corn price and yield changes at different time horizons, before harvest. A cross-validation method was implemented to assess the model performances using Area under the ROC curve (AUC), the Brier Skill Score (BSS) and the Matthew Correlation Coefficient (MCC). The results revealed that EOF principal components derived from satellite-based gross primary production (GPP) in July could be used to predict variations in US corn yields, with an AUC of 0.97 (95% CI 0.92-1), a BSS of 0.75 and an MCC of 0.83. The results also showed that the July spatial averages of satellite GPP data obtained in the US Corn Belt could be used to forecast the forthcoming increase or decrease of global corn prices as evidenced by an AUC reaching up to 0.91, a BSS up to 0.5, and an MCC up to 0.67. Finally, we compared our forecasts of yield and price variations to those derived from the WASDE forecasting method currently implemented in the US. This comparison showed that our approach was at least as accurate and often more accurate than WASDE. This study demonstrates how satellite data can be used to forecast variations in crop yields and corn prices several months before harvest.

Various optimized machine learning techniques to predict agricultural commodity prices

AbstractRecent increases in global food demand have made this research and, therefore, the prediction of agricultural commodity prices, almost imperative. The aim of this paper is to build efficient artificial intelligence methods to effectively forecast commodity prices in light of these global events. Using three separate, well-structured models, the commodity prices of eleven major agricultural commodities that have recently caused crises around the world have been predicted. In achieving its objective, this paper proposes a novel forecasting model for agricultural commodity prices using the extreme learning machine technique optimized with the genetic algorithm. In predicting the eleven commodities, the proposed model, the extreme learning machine with the genetic algorithm, outperforms the model formed by the combination of long short-term memory with the genetic algorithm and the autoregressive integrated moving average model. Despite the fluctuations and changes in agricultural commodity prices in 2022, the extreme learning machine with the genetic algorithm model described in this study successfully predicts both qualitative and quantitative behavior in such a large number of commodities and over such a long period of time for the first time. It is expected that these predictions will provide benefits for the effective management, direction and, if necessary, restructuring of agricultural policies by providing food requirements that adapt to the dynamic structure of the countries.

Monetary policy and distributional effects of agricultural commodity price volatility in Sub-Saharan Africa

Monetary policy and distributional effects of agricultural commodity price volatility in Sub-Saharan Africa

COVID-19, the Russia–Ukraine war and the connectedness between the U.S. and Chinese agricultural futures markets

This study focuses on how recent global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war have affected the relationship between the U.S. and Chinese agricultural futures markets. By applying wavelet coherence analysis (WCA) and time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR), we obtain the following findings. First, both events have changed the correlation and lead–lag comovement between U.S. and Chinese soybean and corn futures returns but have little impact on the comovement between the two cotton futures returns. Second, U.S. agricultural markets transmit more volatility risk to Chinese markets than the risk spillover from the reverse direction. Third, the risk spillover enhancement effect from the war is stronger than that from the pandemic, which is obvious in both the soybean and corn futures markets but not in the cotton market. Our paper has implications for policy makers seeking to stabilize agricultural commodity prices during global crisis episodes and for designing strategies for cross-market hedging of spillover risks among commodity markets for international investors.

Hidden Markov guided Deep Learning models for forecasting highly volatile agricultural commodity prices

Predicting agricultural commodity prices accurately is of utmost importance due to various factors such as perishability, seasonality, production uncertainty etc. Moreover, the substantial volatility that may be exhibited in time series further adds to the complexity and constitutes a significant challenge. In this paper, a Hidden Markov (HM) guided Deep Learning (DL) models has been developed on nonlinear and nonstationary price data of agricultural commodities for forecasting by considering technical indicators viz., Moving Average (MA), Bollinger Bands (BB), Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), Exponential MA (EMA) and Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT). HM Models (HMMs) can effectively handle the sequential dependencies and hidden states, while DL approach can learn complex patterns and relationships within the price series and thus the drawback of lack of generalization capability in the DL model has been overcome by HMM. In this study, the Potato price data of the Champadanga district of West Bengal, India has been utilized to assess the performance of the proposed technique. HMM has been combined with six baseline DL models viz., Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) and Bidirectional GRU (BiGRU) for forecast modeling. Performance evaluation metrics viz., Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and the insightful Diebold–Mariano (DM) test revealed that Hidden Markov hybridized with DL models surpassed baseline DL models in forecasting accuracy for 1-week, 4-week, 8-week and 12-week ahead DL predictions. The proposed approach holds significant promise for enhancing the precision of agricultural commodity price forecasting with far-reaching implications for various stakeholders such as farmers and planners.

The Risk Transfer among Exchange Rates, Energy Commodities, and Agricultural Commodity Prices in SADC Countries

This paper investigates the risk transfer between exchange rates, energy commodities, and agricultural commodity prices in SADC nations from July 29, 2007, to December 18, 2022. The Time-varying parameter Vector Autoregression connectivity technique is specifically used. The total connectivity index for the specific network of energy commodities, currency rates, and agricultural commodities is 24.39%. The energy commodities index (crude oil and heating oil) and the ZAR were the largest shock transmitters, according to averaged dynamic connectedness. In contrast, two SADC currency markets (MWK and MZN), natural gas, and corn were net shock recipients. Furthermore, overall connection indices were shown to change dramatically with high sensitivity to crisis events, particularly the 2007/2008 crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. As indicated by net directional connection, most energy commodities, as well as the Rand and the Pula, were persistent net transmitters over time. This is especially noteworthy given oil's direct impact on agricultural commodities. The findings of this paper are useful for policymakers who are attempting to maximize public benefit. Policymakers charged with developing policies for economically vulnerable segments of the population should use these findings to examine the potential impact of changes in energy prices on food and currency markets.

Forecasting the realized volatility of agricultural commodity prices: Does sentiment matter?

AbstractWe analyze the out‐of‐sample predictive power of sentiment for the realized volatility of agricultural commodity price returns. We use high‐frequency intra‐day data covering the period from 2009 to 2020 to estimate realized volatility. Our baseline forecasting model is a heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model, which we extend to include sentiment. We further enhance this model by incorporating various key realized moments such as leverage, realized skewness, realized kurtosis, realized upside (“good”) volatility, realized downside (“bad”) volatility, realized jumps, realized upside tail risk, and realized downside tail risk. In order to setup a forecasting model, we use (i) forward and backward stepwise predictor selection and (ii) a model‐based averaging algorithm. The forecasting models constructed through these algorithms outperform both the baseline HAR‐RV model and the HAR‐RV‐sentiment model. We conclude that, for the agricultural commodities studied in our research, realized moments play a more significant role in forecasting realized volatility compared to sentiment.

Using Probabilistic Machine Learning Methods to Improve Beef Cattle Price Modeling and Promote Beef Production Efficiency and Sustainability in Canada

Accurate agricultural commodity price models enable efficient allocation of limited natural resources, leading to improved sustainability in agriculture. Because of climate change, price volatility and uncertainty in the sector are expected to increase in the future, increasing the need for improved price modeling. With the emergence of machine learning (ML) algorithms, novel tools are now available to enhance the modeling of agricultural commodity prices. This research explores both univariate and multivariate ML techniques to perform probabilistic price prediction modeling for the Canadian beef industry, taking into account beef production, commodity markets, and international trade features to enhance accuracy. We model Alberta fed steer prices using three multivariate ML algorithms (support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF), and Adaboost (AB)) and three univariate ML algorithms (autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA), and the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous factors (SARIMAX)). We apply these models to monthly fed steer price data between January 2005 and September 2023 and compare predicted prices with observed prices using several validation metrics. The outcomes indicate that both random forest (RF) and Adaboost (AB) show superior overall performance in accurately predicting Alberta fed steer prices in comparison to other algorithms. To better account for the variance of the best model performance, we subsequently adopted a probabilistic approach by considering uncertainty in our best-selected ML model. The beef industry can use these improved price models to minimize resource waste and inefficiency in the sector and improve the long-term sustainability prospects for beef producers in Canada.

Forecasting Rice Prices with Holt-Winter Exponential Smoothing Model

Rice, as a staple food, plays a crucial role in global food security. Accurate forecasting of rice prices is essential for policymakers, farmers, and consumers alike. This article explores the application of the Holt-Winter exponential smoothing model to predict rice prices. Holt-Winter method is chosen for its ability to capture both trend and seasonality in time series data, which are prominent features in agricultural commodity prices such as rice. The study analyzes historical price data, identifies trends, seasonality, and incorporates smoothing parameters in additive and multiplicative methods. Results indicate that additive method of Holt-Winter exponential smoothing provides a better performance. This research contributes valuable insights to the field of agricultural economics and informs strategies for managing food supply chains and market stability.

Exogenous oil supply shocks and global agricultural commodity prices: The role of biofuels

Using quarterly data ranging from 1986Q1 to 2019Q4, this paper identifies an oil supply shock that is exogenous to global real economic activity in the impact quarter based on the proxy structural vector autoregressions (SVAR). Then, the impact of this shock on global agricultural commodity prices is examined, with a particular focus on the role of biofuels in distributing the impact of this shock on global food commodity prices. We find that unfavorable exogenous oil supply shocks have a significant positive effect on global agricultural commodity prices. Moreover, the significant positive effect of the unfavorable exogenous oil supply shock on global agricultural commodity prices is primarily attributable to the impact of the shock on the prices of oils, meals and grains, which are all key biofuel feedstocks. We find evidence that unfavorable exogenous oil supply shocks affect global food commodity prices partly through the biofuel production channel. Finally, we uncover that exogenous oil supply shocks have played an important role in historical food commodity price movements, especially since the early 2000s. These findings are very useful for policymakers in understanding the relationship between oil supply shocks and global agricultural commodity price fluctuations.

Volatility and dependence in crude oil and agricultural commodity markets

ABSTRACT This paper studies the evolution, volatility dynamics, and nonlinear dynamics between crude oil prices and major agricultural commodity prices. Semiparametric GARCH-in-Mean copula models are applied to monthly crude oil, corn, soybean, palm oil, rice, sugar, and wheat prices from January 1990 to May 2023. We find that the Clayton copula is the best copula to describe the (bivariate) dependence structures between the crude oil and soybean, crude oil and palm oil, crude oil and sugar, and crude oil and wheat markets, suggesting the statistically significant lower tail dependence between crude oil and major agricultural commodity returns. Moreover, the tail dependence is strongest between crude oil and palm oil.

Prediction of Agricultural Commodity Prices using Big Data Framework

The agriculture sector plays a crucial role in the economy of Pakistan, contributing significantly to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the employment rate. However, this sector faces challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, and low productivity, which have a direct impact on agricultural commodity prices. Accurate forecasting of commodity prices is essential for farmers, traders, and policymakers to make informed decisions and improve economic outcomes. This paper explores the use of a big data framework for agricultural commodity price forecasting in Pakistan, using a historical dataset on commodity prices in various Pakistani cities from 2007 to 2022 and Apache Spark to preprocess and clean the data. Based on historical spinach prices in Vehari City, the machine learning models Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARIMA), Random Forest, and Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) were applied to price trends, and their performance was compared using Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and squared correlation coefficient (R2). LSTM outperformed ARIMA and Random Forest with a higher R2 value of 0.8 and the lowest MAE of 125.29. Such predictions can help farmers to effectively plan crop cultivation and traders to make well-informed decisions.

Legal Certainty of Farmers' Rights in the Conversion of Use of Ill Land Into Agricultural Land

Utilization of unused land for agricultural land has an important impact on food security and community welfare. This research examines the legal certainty of farmers' rights in the context of land conversion in Indonesia. Law no. 19 of 2013 becomes a strategic framework with a focus on agricultural infrastructure, commodity prices and agricultural insurance. Farming groups have a crucial role as a forum for cooperation and production units, but agricultural land is experiencing shrinkage due to conversion. Evaluation of statutory regulations and stakeholder cooperation are needed to protect farmers' rights and ensure the sustainability of the agricultural sector. This research shows the urgency of legal clarity in land ownership, the role of village government, and protecting farmers' rights. With a focus on legal certainty and farmers' rights, this research provides in-depth insights and policy recommendations to improve legal protection and achieve sustainable development goals in the agricultural sector

MAKİNE ÖĞRENMESİNDE REGRESYON MODELLERİNİN TAHMİN PERFORMANSLARININ KARŞILAŞTIRILMASI: TÜRKİYE ÜRÜN İHTİSAS BORSASI BUĞDAY ENDEKSİ ÜZERİNE BİR UYGULAMA

Agricultural commodity prices have significant impacts on economies by leading to changes and regulations in both fiscal and monetary policies. These also have effects on household economies and consumer purchasing power particularly in developing countries. Thereby, instability and variability in these prices constitute adverse effects on these economies. On the other hand, assets of the commodity markets become popular just as bonds and stocks. Because of this growing interest, needs for managing risks, stable prices and lowering transaction costs has led to establishment of the commodity exchanges. In this context, Turkey put the licensed warehousing system into operation by founding the Turkish Mercantile Exchange (TMEX) to operate trades of Electronic Warehouse Receipts (EWRs). In this study, a model including US Dollar-Turkish Lira exchange rate (USD/TRY), Brent crude-oil prices, overnight interest rate and a daily dataset for the 01/04/2021-20/02/2023 period were used to assess several machine learning regression methods in predicting the TMEX Wheat Index (TMXWHT). As verified by comparisons with actual values and considering performance evaluation criteria, all methods yielded successful outcomes, furthermore, tree-based methods revealed better overall performance.

A Study on Agricultural Commodity Price Prediction Model Based on Secondary Decomposition and Long Short-Term Memory Network

In order to address the significant prediction errors resulting from the substantial fluctuations in agricultural product prices and the non-linear features, this paper proposes a hybrid forecasting model based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), and long short-term memory networks (LSTM). This combined model is referred to as the VMD–EEMD–LSTM model. Initially, the original time series of agricultural product prices undergoes decomposition using VMD to obtain a series of variational mode functions (VMFs) and a residual component with higher complexity. Subsequently, the residual component undergoes a secondary decomposition using EEMD. All components are then fed into an LSTM model for training to obtain predictions for each component. Finally, the predictions for each component are linearly combined to generate the ultimate price forecast. To validate the effectiveness of the VMD–EEMD–LSTM model, empirical analyses were conducted for one-step and multi-step forecasts using weekly price data for pork, Chinese chives, shiitake mushrooms, and cauliflower from China’s wholesale agricultural markets. The results indicate that the composite model developed in this study provides enhanced forecasting accuracy.

A Sustainable Risk Management Model and Instruments for Young Farmers in EU Agriculture

Young farmers are ready to embrace innovation, smart agriculture, and science-based research to ensure that their work has long-term viability, profitability, and productivity. To prevent the farming population from aging and to ensure farming success, financial support must be provided through instruments that are specifically aimed at young farmers. It is necessary that youth have access to agricultural land policy throughout the EU for the agricultural sector to remain sustainable. In the European Union, young farmers manage farms that are in the lowest-size group. The limited financial possibilities available to young people in the EU exacerbate this. The relationships between risk management instruments and other interventions (such as direct payment and ex-post instruments) and the integration of these tools into national and EU policy frameworks must be thoroughly examined in future policy. Evaluating the possible repercussions of risk management being widely implemented as well as measuring the anticipated variations in farm revenue and the volatility of agricultural commodity prices are equally crucial. Therefore, the present article utilized extant data to conduct a comparative analysis and ultimately present a set of multidisciplinary and quantitative indicators of supportive measures for young farmers in the EU, while also identifying the requisite areas for improvement.