biofuel and food-commodity prices生物燃料和食品原材料价格上涨.pdfVIP

Agriculture 2012, 2, 272-281; doi:10.3390/agriculture2030272 OPEN ACCESS agriculture ISSN 2077-0472 /journal/agriculture Article Biofuel and Food-Commodity Prices Gal Hochman 1,*, Scott Kaplan 2, Deepak Rajagopal 3 and David Zilberman 2 1 Department of Agriculture, Food, and Resource Economics, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Rd., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA 2 Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of California Berkeley, 207 Giannini Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; E-Mails: scottkaplan@ (S.K.); zilber11@ (D.Z.) 3 Institute of Environment, University of California Los-Angeles, La Kretz Hall, Suite 300, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mail: rdeepak@ * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: gal.hochman@; Tel.: +1-848-932-9142; Fax: +1-732-932- 932-8887. Received: 4 August 2012; in revised form: 10 September 2012 / Accepted: 18 September 2012 / Published:24 September 2012 Abstract: The paper summarizes key findings of alternative lines of research on the relationship between food and fuel markets, and identifies gaps between two bodies of literature: one that investigates the relationship between food and fuel prices, and another that investigates the impact of the introduction of biofuels on commodity-food prices. The former body of literature suggests that biofuel prices do not affect food-commodity prices, but the latter suggests it does. We try to explain this gap, and then show that although biofuel w