The Economics of Oil, Biofuel and Food Commodities

Eric Bahel (), Walid Marrouch () and Gérard Gaudet ()

Working Papers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we study the effects on the food market of the introduction of biofuels as a substitute for fossil fuel in the energy market. We consider a world economy with an oil cartel and a competitive fringe of farmers producing energy in the form of biofuels. Farmers also produce food and sell it on the world food market. We determine the resulting relationship between prices in the energy and food markets and characterize the cartel's extraction path and the price path of energy. We show that the price of food will be growing as long the oil stock is being depleted, whether population is growing or not, and that it will keep growing after the oil stock is exhausted if population is growing.

Keywords: biofuel; oil depletion; population growth; energy price; food price (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cwa and nep-ene
Date: 2010
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ftp://repec.econ.vt.edu/Papers/Bahel/paper_biofuel.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Economics of Oil, Biofuel and Food Commodities (2011)
Working Paper: The Economics of Oil, Biofuel and Food Commodities (2011)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vpi:wpaper:e07-26

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