more generally the price volatility of internationally tradable products is lower in subsaharan africa than that of nontradable commodities and commodities that are tradable only on regional markets world bank and international monetary fund for example wheat rice and cooking oil products that are imported on the african continent exhibit lower price volatility than the prices of domestically produced staples efforts to increase the tradability of these less traded commodities would help to lower their high domestic price volatility there has been extensive investigation of the importance of such import surges in recent years sharma