This paper has benefited greatly from a discussion of an earlier version with the participants of the first Humboldt Forum for Food and Agriculture in Davos, Switzerland in March 2009. Research has been made possible in part by a research grant from BASF SE - The Chemical Company. The first two...

For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...

Agriculture in many industrialized countries is heavily subsidized.1 The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union provides subsidies in a variety of ways. They include agricultural producer price support (by means of import restrictions, export subsidies, domestic production...