A "new normal" for food and agriculture markets?
Channel: ICTSD
Date: 2015-06-03

Prices for food and agricultural products have fallen steadily since hitting a peak in 2011 – despite analysis at the time suggesting that higher and more volatile prices from 2006 onwards were a symptom of a new paradigm in food and agricultural markets, reflecting fundamentally different connections between agricultural and energy markets due to biofuels, a new pattern of weather-related production shocks and lagging productivity growth in the face of sustained demand growth especially in developing countries.

This meeting will explore new trends in agricultural and energy markets and discuss the extent to which they are likely to be representative of longer-term phenomena, as well as examining the possible implications they could have for negotiators seeking to shape new rules that will govern the multilateral trading system in the years or decades ahead.