Competitiveness of agricultural commodities in the United States: Expanding our view

This paper strives to offer some perspective and ideas to suggest that examining commodity markets in isolation from product markets may not work under a more global trading regime. The objectives of this paper are to (1) provide the basic logic of problems that may occur from examining commodities alone and (2) illustrate this with a discrete case-cotton (and its interface with textiles). However, the implications of this paper are not limited to cotton and are applicable to any case where production and processing within the value chain occur in different areas of the world.