Food/Fuel Price Dynamics: Developing A Framework For Strategic Investments

Responding to changing commodity prices presents a complex decision-making environment to multinational corporations. To successfully operationalize strategy corporations must deal with food/energy tradeoff issues. However, navigating commodities markets, regional and national regulatory and economic systems, and the geopolitical implications of food and energy business and policy can be overwhelming without an intuitive, comprehensive framework for guidance. A robust framework is suggested in this paper that was specifically crafted for this purpose.

This discussion piece strips away common assumptions about the food/fuel relationship by testing some key hypotheses that draw on a deep and wide examination of disparate and cross-disciplinary data. The paper also sets out a food/energy tradeoff decision-making model.