The discovery of sugarcane smut in one Queensland cane region, in June2006, triggered a clear-cut biosecurity response aimed at containment anderadication. Farm financial analyses helped to set the incentives offered tocanegrowers to gain their cooperation in the eradication effort financed...

This paper is based on the premise that if CARICOM’s agricultural sector in general, and more specifically the export sub-sector, is to thrive in the rapidly changing trade environment there has to be a continuous systematic assessment of market opportunities and competitiveness status. Such...

This paper measures profit efficiency and examines the effect of access to microfinance on theperformance of rice firms in Bangladesh. An extended Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier profit function wasused to assess profit efficiency and profit loss of rice farmers in Bangladesh in a survey data...

This article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...

Regarding the nature of yield data, there are two basic characteristics that needs to be accommodated while we are about to model a yield distribution. The first one is the nonstationary nature of the yield distribution, which causes the heteroscedasticity related problems. The second one is the...

Options on agricultural futures are popular financial instruments used for agricultural price risk management and to speculate on future price movements. Poor performance of Black’s classical option pricing model has stimulated many researchers to introduce pricing models that are more...

We theoretically examine a farmer’s coverage demand with area and individual insurance plans as either separate or integrated options. The individual and area losses are assumed to be imperfectly and positively correlated. With actuarially fair rates, the farmer will fully insure with the...

We theoretically examine a farmer’s coverage demand with area and individual insurance plans as either separate or integrated options. The individual and area losses are assumed to be imperfectly and positively correlated. With actuarially fair rates, the farmer will fully insure with the...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

The study explores a long memory conditional volatility model on international grain markets, demonstrating importance of modeling both temporal effects of volatility and long memory process. This study adopts six different volatility models, nested in an ARMA(p,q)- FIGARCH(P,D,Q), to capture...