Commodity price shocks are times when the prices for

commodities In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. Th ...

have drastically increased or decreased over a short span of time.

Post-Napoleonic Irish grain price and land use shocks (1815–1816)

During the international Post-Napoleonic Depression (1815–1821) following the conclusion of the

French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (sometimes called the Great French War or the Wars of the Revolution and the Empire) were a series of conflicts between the French and several European monarchies between 1792 and 1815. They encompas ...

(1792–1815),

wheat Wheat is a group of wild and crop domestication, domesticated Poaceae, grasses of the genus ''Triticum'' (). They are Agriculture, cultivated for their cereal grains, which are staple foods around the world. Well-known Taxonomy of wheat, whe ...

and other

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached husk, hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and ...

prices fell by half in

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

, and alongside continued population growth,

landlord A landlord is the owner of property such as a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate that is rented or leased to an individual or business, known as a tenant (also called a ''lessee'' or ''renter''). The term landlord appli ...

s converted cropland into

rangeland Rangelands are grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands, and deserts that are grazed by domestic livestock or wild animals. Types of rangelands include tallgrass and shortgrass prairies, desert grasslands and shrublands, woodlands, savanna ...

by securing the passage of

tenant farmer A tenant farmer is a farmer or farmworker who resides and works on land owned by a landlord, while tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and ma ...

eviction Eviction is the removal of a Tenement (law), tenant from leasehold estate, rental property by the landlord. In some jurisdictions it may also involve the removal of persons from premises that were foreclosure, foreclosed by a mortgagee (often ...

legislation in 1816, which led, because of the Irish workforce's historic concentration in agriculture, to a greater subdivision of remaining land plots under

tillage Tillage is the agriculture, agricultural preparation of soil by mechanical wikt:agitation#Noun, agitation of various types, such as digging, stirring, and overturning. Examples of manual labour, human-powered tilling methods using hand tools inc ...

and increasingly less efficient and less profitable subsistence farms.

1971–1973

At the time of the

1973 oil crisis In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Eg ...

, the price of corn and wheat went up by a factor of three.

2000s decade

During the 2000s, the price of

Brent Crude Brent Crude may refer to any or all of the components of the Brent Complex, a physically and financially traded oil market based around the North Sea of Northwest Europe; colloquially, Brent Crude usually refers to the price of the ICE (Intercon ...

rose above $30 a barrel in 2003 before peaking at $147.30 in July 2008. With the onset of the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of market decline in economies around the world that occurred from late 2007 to mid-2009.

, reduced demand for oil caused the price to fall to $39 per barrel in December 2008. The

2007–2008 world food price crisis World food prices increased dramatically in 2007 and the first and second quarter of 2008, creating a International crisis, global crisis and causing political and economic instability and social unrest in both Poor countries, poor and develop ...

saw corn, wheat, and rice go up by a factor of three when measured in US dollars.

Second half of 2014

Chinas New Normal Challenges Ahead for Asia-Pacific Trade 1

Global commodity prices fell 38% between June 2014 and February 2015. Demand and supply conditions led to lower price expectations for all nine of the World Bank's commodity price indices – an extremely rare occurrence. The commodity price shock in the second half of 2014 cannot be attributed to any single factor or defining event. It was caused by a host of industry-specific, macroeconomic and financial factors which came together to cause the simultaneous large drops across many different commodity classes. Amongst these, the transition of China's economy to more sustainable levels of growth and the shale-energy boom in the United States were the dominant demand-side and supply-side factors governing the downturn in global commodity prices.

2020

On April 20, 2020, WTI's May contract closed at -$37.63/barrel while the June contract closed at positive $20.43/barrel. The main cause is due to the ongoing

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

which has reduced demand along with storage issues and the expiration of the May contract the following day.

References

External links

"Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Report 2015: Supporting Participation in Value Chains", United Nations ESCAP, November, 2, 2015
{{Population History of international trade Commodity markets