What Lies Behind the Food Prices Crisis
Author: Jana Georges El Choueiry
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the eve of the Financial Crisis that exploded in the summer of 2007, another more vital crisis came into view, the Food Prices Crisis. Riots; protests and conflicts invaded a vast number of countries urging public authorities to react so that to mitigate the effect of a food emergency situation that emerged in developing countries. Whenever a problem with that level of seriousness arises, it is crucial for World's leaders to deeply analyze the issue so that to track down its sources and start curing it.--The main goal of this project is to identify all possible reasons that lie behind the 2007-2008 food prices crisis and to see how drastic its effects were especially on developing countries where originally a problem of food scarcity was faced. After having identified the possible causes and effects of the surge in food commodities prices in Chapter II, this project presents an insight on the Biofuels, an alternative energy source which are increasingly attracting attention and begun steadily expanding in 2003 especially in the US, Brazil and the EU. The reason why Chapter III is dedicated to biofuels is due to the debate there is about these fuels and whether they add upward pressure on food prices for the strong relationship that exists between them and agriculture commodities. --The project then moves to the empirical part of its work in Chapter IV, whereby tests will be conducted to examine the existence of a long run relationship between the dependent variable that is the IMF Food Price Index and all of the five independent variables that are the World Ethanol Production, Open Interests on futures commodities markets, Oil Price Index, China's and India's population and last but not least the value of the USD against 1EUR. After having identified the most significant long run relationship exhibited between some of the independent variables and the dependent variable, this Chapter moves then to testing the existence of a short run relationship and to do.