Agriculture 2012, 2(3), 272-281; doi:10.3390/agriculture2030272
Article

Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices

Gal Hochman 1,* email, Scott Kaplan 2 email, Deepak Rajagopal 3 email and David Zilberman 2 email
1 Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Rd., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA 2 Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of California Berkeley, 207 Giannini Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 3 Institute of Environment, University of California Los-Angeles, La Kretz Hall, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 4 August 2012; in revised form: 10 September 2012 / Accepted: 18 September 2012 / Published: 24 September 2012
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biofuels, Food Security, and Accompanying Environmental Concerns)
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Abstract: The paper summarizes key findings of alternative lines of research on the relationship between food and fuel markets, and identifies gaps between two bodies of literature: one that investigates the relationship between food and fuel prices, and another that investigates the impact of the introduction of biofuels on commodity-food prices. The former body of literature suggests that biofuel prices do not affect food-commodity prices, but the latter suggests it does. We try to explain this gap, and then show that although biofuel was an important contributor to the recent food-price inflation of 2001–2008, its effect on food-commodity prices declined after the recession of 2008/09. We also show that the introduction of cross-price elasticity is important when explaining soybean price, but less so when explaining corn prices.
Keywords: biofuels; commodity-food prices; economic growth; energy prices; exchange rate

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MDPI and ACS Style

Hochman, G.; Kaplan, S.; Rajagopal, D.; Zilberman, D. Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices. Agriculture 2012, 2, 272-281.

AMA Style

Hochman G, Kaplan S, Rajagopal D, Zilberman D. Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices. Agriculture. 2012; 2(3):272-281.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Hochman, Gal; Kaplan, Scott; Rajagopal, Deepak; Zilberman, David. 2012. "Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices." Agriculture 2, no. 3: 272-281.

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