The author considers the benefit to agricultural producers of commodity price insurance that provides in every year-but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty--a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

Studies of risk and its consequences tend to focus on one risk factor, such as a drought or an economic crisis. Yet 2003 household surveys in rural Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash-crop-growing regions in Tanzania that experienced a precipitous coffee price decline around the turn of the...