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Historical Behaviour of Food Prices and Their Likely Future Path

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Historical behaviour of food prices and their likely future path

By

Anne-Sophie Corbeau
Georgios Gavotsis
Jie Yue
Michael Mahmoud
Nanditha Chinnaraj
Raphael Zumofen

Business Economics
Lecturer: Professor David Shepherd
Imperial College Business School
MSc Management

Word Count: 2495

10th November 2011

“The common theme for why all these commodity prices are higher is the substantial increase in fund flow into these markets, which are not big enough to withstand the increase in funds without pushing up prices”
By Kevin Morrison, Journalist for the Financial Times
April 9, 2006
Table of Contents

i. Introduction 1 ii. Movements in food prices 1 iii. Structure of the food market 8 iv. Government Intervention in the Food Market 10
a. Tariffs and Quotas 10
b. Subsidies and Export Taxes 11
c. Price Support Mechanisms 13
v. Forecast of food prices evolution over the next 20 years 16 vi. Bibliography 21

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to analyse the various factors that have contributed not only to rise of food prices over the last two decades, ending the trend of falling food prices#, but also how the structure of the food commodity market and government intervention have contributed to price spikes and generally increasing food commodity prices. The paper will conclude with a forecast of long-term food prices and the factors that will contribute to a continued increase or fall in food commodity prices.
Movements in food prices

The global food market is described as competitive, allowing us to apply a demand and supply analysis in order to explain the short term and long term movements in food prices over the last twenty years.
The analysis is based on the FAO Food Price Index (Figure 1) with the long-run considered as a twenty year period starting in

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