Via UI Library subscription., Owner-president of Brock Associates, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, describes his career, the services his firm provides, outlook for agricultural commodities, and farm policy changes anticipated with the new federal administration.
7 pages, This study aims to identify whether there is dependence between agricultural commodities traded on the Brazilian market. We used the bivariate copula method over a ten-year period to assess the extreme effects on the returns of the following commodities: soybean, wheat, Arabica coffee, and Robusta coffee. The relationship directly affects the dependence between Arabica and Robusta coffees commodities. While the relationship between wheat, Arabica and Robusta coffees, and soybean is positively dependent. Economic growth, market dynamics, and the prices of an agricultural commodity tend to increase the price of other commodities.
7 pages, This study aims to identify whether there is dependence between agricultural commodities traded on the Brazilian market. We used the bivariate copula method over a ten-year period to assess the extreme effects on the returns of the following commodities: soybean, wheat, Arabica coffee, and Robusta coffee. The relationship directly affects the dependence between Arabica and Robusta coffees commodities. While the relationship between wheat, Arabica and Robusta coffees, and soybean is positively dependent. Economic growth, market dynamics, and the prices of an agricultural commodity tend to increase the price of other commodities.
18 pages, This study examines the application of a self-reliance framework for practitioners and evaluators to better understand the capacities and intrinsic factors impacting smallholder coffee farmers’ commercialization behaviors. We surveyed 40 smallholder coffee producers in Peru using a quantitative instrument. Data were analyzed to determine if statistical relationships exist between farmers’ self-reliance (measured via knowledge and skills, attitudes, and aspirations) and their commercialization behaviors. Findings indicate the self-reliance framework effectively illustrates relationships between farmers’ aspirations, knowledge and skills and their commercialization behaviors, while future, additional studies are needed to better measure and understand the role of commercialization-related attitudes. Practitioners can leverage the study’s findings by using a self-reliance framework to infer farmers’ likeliness to pursue sustainable commercialization practices and align their trainings and design interventions based on evaluation findings. The conceptual self-reliance framework is the first of its kind applied for smallholder coffee commercialization. The findings demonstrate that self-reliance concepts employed recently in other contexts may potentially be used similarly by extension and development facilitators.
6 pages, The growing local demands for wheat products due changing taste of the population consistently create gap in local production, resulted in huge import, making wheat a strategic crop to the country. The objective of this study is to assess local production and import in Nigeria, challenges devilling wheat production and strategies employed by various stakeholders to encourage local wheat production. The study uses secondary data obtained from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to assess local production and import, while available literature was reviewed for challenges devilling wheat production and the strategies employed to encourage local production by stakeholders. The study revealed that, local wheat production is stagnated while import is increasing, and the value of import increased by 66.5% between 2016 – 2020. The challenges of wheat production in Nigeria ranges from unfavourable climatic conditions, limited access to improved seed varieties, high cost of production, inadequate irrigation infrastructure, insufficient funding systems, lack of a cohesive national strategy on wheat development, and the unclear role of various stakeholders among others. The need for improved security, stable and consistent Government policies, encourage mechanization, fostering collaborations among stakeholders, increased investment in research and training, expansion of irrigation land and facilities and increase farmers access to credit are the major strategies suggested to boost local wheat production.
11 pages, In this paper, we investigate the interdependence among changes in the prices of beef, pork, and chicken in Japan using a time-varying coefficient vector autoregressive model. Our empirical analysis using monthly data from January 1990 to March 2014 shows that changes in beef prices have long-term influences on changes in pork and chicken prices. Moreover, current changes in the prices of beef, pork, and chicken are closely related to changes in their prices in the preceding two months. Additionally, we do not find that the bovine spongiform encephalopathy outbreak announced by the Japanese government in September 2001 had a long-term influence on the dynamic relationships among changes in the prices of beef, pork, and chicken in Japan.
