The role of stabilisation policies, including the use of stocks and trade policies, is discussed in the study by Abbott (Abbott, 2012) in the OECD study Agricultural Policies for Poverty Reduction (OECD, 2012b). The world output of individual food commodities is much less variable than output in individual countries, so greater trade integration holds considerable potential for stabilising food prices. This stabilising role relies on the fact that commodity output shocks across countries are weakly correlated.