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.
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.
16 pages, The U.S. Midwest is a major producer of grain, meat, dairy, eggs, and other major agricultural commodities. It has also been increasingly impacted by climate change-related extreme weather over the last decade as droughts, extreme rains, floods, and, most recently, a severe derecho have damaged crops, livestock, and livelihoods. Climate and agricultural scientists and other stakeholders are concerned that without major shifts away from degrading practices toward regenerative systems, long-term sustainability will be compromised. We used cumulative logistic regression to analyze data from a 2020 survey of 1,059 Iowa farmers to examine (1) how farmers are adapting to increasingly variable and extreme weather-related to climate change and (2) whether selected factors were associated with different kinds of adaptive (e.g., increased use of cover crops) or potentially maladaptive (e.g., increased use of pesticides) actions. Our results found that many farmers have been taking adaptive and maladaptive actions. Stewardship ethics, attitudes toward adaptive action, and integration in conservation-related networks were consistent, positive predictors of increases in adaptive practices. On the other hand, faith in crop insurance as a coping strategy, farm scale, and other factors were associated with some maladaptive actions, with several positive predictors of adaptation also being positive predictors of maladaptation, use of pesticides and drainage in particular. This research contributes to the growing literature on climate risk management and adaptation in agricultural landscapes by providing empirical evidence of the factors related to farmers' adaptive and maladaptive actions.
