Agricultural Finance: From Crops to Land, Water and Infrastructure

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to extend my very warm thanks to my PhD students Bo Liu for his remarkably intelligent and merciless proofreading of the book – all remaining typos or repetitions are my sole responsibility – and Pedro Vergel and Tara Velez for their talent in building a number of price trajectories and forward curves. I would also like to thank Hugo Forget and Patrick Slama for their help in editing.

Second, I want to express my gratitude to my friends Hilary Till, from Premia Capital Management, and George Martin, from Wood Creek Capital Management, for the great discussions and reports exchanges we had over the years, some of them being reflected in this book.

Lastly, I am grateful to Javier Blas, editor at the Financial Times and other journalists at the FT, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Business Times (Singapore), and other newspapers for their prompt and beautiful coverage of a number of new developments in the world of agricultural commodities; they allowed me to corroborate my own findings. I tried to trace and pay tribute to the first publication, sometimes a World Bank, USDA or another official organization valuable report.

On a side note, I wish to mention that I chose the article ‘he’ throughout the book for ease of use and did not intend to place the male gender above any other gender.