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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the price and volatility transmission between natural gas, fertilizer (ammonia), and corn markets, an issue that has been traditionally ignored in the literature despite its significant importance.

The authors jointly estimate a vector error correction model for the conditional mean equation and a multivariate generalized autoregressive heteroskedasticity model for the conditional volatility equation to investigate the interactions between natural gas, ammonia, and corn prices and their volatility.

The authors find significant interplay between fertilizer and corn markets, while only a mild linkage in prices and volatility exist between those markets and natural gas during the period 1994-2014. There is not only a positive relationship between corn and ammonia prices in the short run, but both prices react to deviations from the long-run parity. Furthermore, the lagged conditional volatility of ammonia prices positively affects conditional volatility in the corn market and vice versa. This result is robust to a specification using crude oil price as an alternative to natural gas price to account for the large transportation cost built into ammonia prices. Results for the period of 2006-2014 indicate virtually no linkage between natural gas prices and those of fertilizer and corn during that period, while linkages in price level and volatility between the latter remain strong.

This paper is the first in the literature to comprehensively examine the role of fertilizer on corn prices and volatility, and its relation to natural gas prices.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role Italian Producer Organizations (POs) play in implementing sustainability actions in the fruit and vegetable sector. In particular, it aimed at verifying whether environmental actions reveal different models with respect to implementation of sustainability and at analyzing the relationship between environmental strategies and specific POs’ characteristics.

The work is based on a field survey carried out by submitting a questionnaire to POs. Collected data were processed by means of exploratory data and multivariate analysis techniques. A cluster analysis was used to classify POs with respect to their ability/will to translate views into sustainability actions.

Three different groups were identified with reference to the involvement in ethical and environmental actions. Results show that POs’ strategies often include interlinked economic and environmental objectives. In particular, product quality improvement often goes with the promotion of environmentally friendly techniques, while other environmental actions respond to a reduction costs rather than to a sustainability strategy.

Only 38 out of 300 POs returned the questionnaire. Because of the small sample, the analysis has only an exploratory nature and aims at giving a first insight on how sustainability issues are intended and implemented in the agri-food sector.

Most works have analyzed environmental strategies at the company level. This study focused on POs in the agri-food sector as they can also represent the drivers of a sustainability pattern involving their members.