Does price volatility matter? An assessment along EU food chains

Tsion Assefa, Alfons G.J.M. Lansink and Miranda Meuwissen

No 210965, 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Agricultural prices in European food markets have become substantially more volatile over the past decade thereby exposing agribusinesses to risk and uncertainty. How food chain actors perceive and manage the risk from price volatility remained unexplored so far. We interviewed farmers, wholesalers, processors and retailers in six European food supply chains on their price volatility perceptions and management strategies. Contrary to common belief, findings show that price volatility matters not only to farmers but to all food chain actors. Actors perceive a more than 15% deviation of prices from their expected levels as price volatility. We further show that three factors determine whether price volatility is perceived as risky: the persistence, the reason and the direction of price deviations. Price volatility management strategies in EU food chains are very diverse and well beyond futures and forward contracts. The scope for policy interventions is identified based on strategy gaps identified in the chains.

Keywords: Financial Economics; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/210965/files/A ... ood%20chains-805.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae15:210965

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.210965

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().