Others provide entry into commodities markets or let you buy a group of commodity producers.
The primary beneficiaries have been commodity producers, the hospitality industry and certain types of manufacturers.
Agricultural commodity producers should be supported to diversify and scale up their production.
They can, for example, tax the foreign earnings of commodity producers, ploughing the proceeds into a sovereign-wealth fund that invests in foreign assets.
Kenya, the largest supplier of cut flowers to Europe, and East African commodity producers could be badly hit, said Standard Chartered economist Razia Khan.
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Again, Canada, Malaysia and Mexico, all big commodity producers, would be among the hardest-hit, but the euro area and Japan, big commodity importers, would gain.
Traditionally, commodity producers have looked to consumption in U.S. and Europe.
The contagion has been more severe in Latin America because most Latin countries are big commodity producers and some of their economies are far from sound.
Higher futures prices could have sent a signal to commodity producers, who then decided to hoard their stocks rather than sell them in the cash market.
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This suggests that commodity producers have confidence in future demand.
Raising its guidance for aluminum demand next year is a positive sign for major commodity producers and other firms connected to the sector, including Caterpillar, U.S. Steel, and Deere.
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Its purchases of foreign assets keep the cost of capital down and its appetite for raw materials keeps their price up, to the benefit of commodity producers wherever they sell their wares.
Commodity producers, such as Russia, have benefited from very high raw-materials prices whereas for consumers, such as China and India, the gains from higher global activity have more than offset higher commodity costs.
It is because they want to be re-elected and they need the big political donations from those who lobby for the insurance industry, the medical device industry, the pharmaceutical companies, the commodity producers and a host of others.
Of course, a major global economic catastrophe, or some new breakthrough in energy or agricultural technology, could bring prices down precipitously, but for the most part demographic trends seem likely to favor commodity producers over the coming decade or two.
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Wanniski says the first wave of deflation to hit the U.S. was a result of the currency crisis in Thailand that spread to the rest of Asia in 1997 and severely affected U.S. commodity producers like hog farmers and oil drillers.
What about this commodity has temporarily given producers the greatest (albeit temporary) margin in history?
For two decades Huntsman had been one of the world's largest privately held producers of commodity chemicals like polystyrene.
Fairtrade's price-adjustment mechanism is intended to insulate small producers from volatile commodity markets and the free-trading, no-holds-barred capitalism that multinational companies espouse.
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That is mainly because the United States and Europe see ethanol as an agricultural commodity and protect their own producers (mainly of corn ethanol).
For one, profits attract imitators, and as this is being read a lot of marginal producers are entering the commodity space, funded by lemming investors desperate to avoid missing out on the boom.
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For agricultural companies and food producers, however, rising commodity prices can be a blessing or a curse, depending on where the company is in the food-processing chain.
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Rising commodity prices can translate into higher food costs, especially as producers of beef, pork and chicken look to pass on higher animal-feed costs.
The major part of oil shipments by international producers is denominated in Brent crude, so talk of a commodity supercycle lacks credibility.
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Surging commodity prices courtesy of Benjamin Bernanke have placed tremendous strain on the margins of producers.
Most commodity prices are denominated in dollars, and many of the world's producers have currencies that have risen against the greenback, sometimes by a lot.
In commodity steels, Brazilian firms are already among the world's lowest-cost producers, so there is no real pressure to merge to cut costs.
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