Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

New research on the commodity coffee market in Uganda finds that when prices percolate, coffee windfalls don't fully reach the growers. Coffee is the world's largest agricultural commodity, and is also one of the world's most volatile. Large global coffee price fluctuations mean coffee has seen a number of periods of rapidly increasing prices. But new research shows that when global coffee prices rise, farmers do not see the same rise in the price they receive. In their new study for Economic Development and Cultural Change, Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill look to the long-time coffee producing nation of Uganda to attempt to answer this riddle. The country's economy is fully liberalized, and the large coffee market makes up nearly the entire bulk of its agricultural exports. "The story we tell," say Fafchamps and Hill, "is unexpected. Normally as economists we think that competition is good, yet here it does not achieve the desired result." To their surprise, they observed that the influx of seasonal buyers-the so-called "ddebe boys"-that attends higher prices actually means price increases are not fully passed on to the growers........