Application of Price Elasticities to Farm Policy Analysis: Comment

In an article titled, “Application of Price Elasticities to Farm Policy Analysis,†Bateman and Stennis [1] present an intriguing analysis of the use of demand elasticities for U.S. farm policy in the world market perspective. They present two different approaches to demonstrate the importance of the world market to U.S. agriculture and conclude that unilateral reduction in production of U.S. farm products is not likely to enhance and to maintain farm income unless the farm commodities under consideration are almost perfectly inelastic in the world market and/or the U.S. is the only or dominant source of supply. The analyses are based on the estimated elasticities and the logic of economic deduction.