Some Observations on Price Instability, Agricultural Trade Policy and the Food Consumer

The agricultural economics profession has probably devoted as much time to the study of stability as to anything else. Arguably, it was the enquiry into the behaviour of agricultural product prices during the inter-war period which first gave agricultural economics an identity separate from other branches of applied economics, and this interest has continued to the present. Further, the stability issue has impinged upon most branches of the discipline, involving the study of the impact of price uncertainty on the behaviour of farm firms and the development of farm planning techniques in the face of uncertainty; the welfare implications of resource allocation in the face of price uncertainty; explanatory models of the causes of price instability; and stabilisation policies at both a national and international level.