At the fourth Session of the AMIS Global Food Market Information Group, which was held in Rome in October 2013, the Group requested the AMIS Secretariat to undertake a closer examination of agricultural price transmission from futures benchmarks to farm-gate. That request provided the genesis for this paper.

Although price transmission is the subject of much academic research in the United States, elsewhere it is little studied. In fact, the basic questions about how prices diffuse from global markets to the farm among the major agricultural producers have gone largely unasked. Such questions include: How do prices get relayed from the CME benchmarks to the farming oblasts in Ukraine or to the Brazilian producers of Mato Grosso? Which components along the supply chain facilitate price transmission and which impede them? How relevant are futures market prices – whether global or regional - to producer price realization? And finally, given that commodity prices are so globalized, why do producers in some farming regions thrive and enjoy high price realization whereas others seem bound to a persistent low level of income? Using a qualitative approach, the paper attempts to answer these questions.