The World of Non-conventional commodities ?

The World of Non-conventional commodities ?

Having been in the business of commodity trading ever since I passed out of engineering in the year 1996 has made me look at this business through different cycles and also through different perspectives.
The world of Non conventional commodities,i.e commodities that are truly not commodities but people at large are considering them to be commodities.
Nature's commodity outputs

Commodity thinking is undergoing a more direct revival thanks to the theorists of "natural capital" Natural capital, as described in the book Natural Capitalism, is a metaphor for the mineral, plant, and animal formations of the Earth's biosphere when viewed as a means of production of oxygen, water filter, erosion preventer, or provider of other ecosystem services. It is one approach to ecosystem valuation, an alternative to the traditional view of all non-human life as passive natural resources, and to the idea of ecological health. However, human knowledge and understanding of the natural environment is never complete, and therefore the boundaries of natural capital expand or contract as knowledge is gained or lost Natural Cpital whose products, some economists argue, are the only genuine commodities - air, water, and calories we consume being mostly interchangeable when they are free of pollution or disease. Whether we wish to think of these things as tradeable commodities rather than birthrights has been a major source of controversy in many nations.

Most types of environmental economics consider the shift to measuring them inevitable, arguing that reframing political economy to consider the flow of these basic commodities first and foremost, helps avoids use of any military fiat except to protect "natural capital" itself, and basing credit-worthiness more strictly on commitment to preserving biodiversity aligns the long-term interests of ecoregions, societies, and individuals. They seek relatively conservative sustainable development schemes that would be amenable to measuring well-being over long periods of time, typically "seven generations", in line with Native American as well as the Hindu 'Saptha kula' thought.

Weather trading

However, this is not the only way in which commodity thinking interacts with ecologists' thinking. Hedging began as a way to escape the consequences of damage done by natural conditions. It has matured not only into a system of interlocking guarantees, but also into a system of indirectly trading on the actual damage done by weather, using "weather derivatives". For a price, this relieves the purchaser of the following types of concerns:
"Will a freeze hurt the Brazilian coffee crop? Will there be a drought in the U.S. Corn Belt? What are the chances that we will have a cold winter, driving natural gas prices higher and creating havoc in Florida orange areas? What is the status of El Niño? How is Hurricane Dean going to affect Crude oilt prices ?"
Emissions trading

Weather trading is just one example of "negative commodities", units of which represent harm rather than good.
"Economy is three fifths of ecology" argues Mike Nickerson, one of many economic theorists who holds that nature's productive services and waste disposal services are poorly accounted for. One way to fairly allocate the waste disposal capacity of nature is "cap and trade" market structure that is used to trade toxic emissions rights in the United States, e.g. SO2. This is in effect a "negative commodity", a right to throw something away.
In this market, the atmosphere's capacity to absorb certain amounts of pollutants is measured, divided into units, and traded amongst various market players. Those who emit more SO2 must pay those who emit less. Critics of such schemes argue that unauthorized or unregulated emissions still happen, and that "grandfathering" schemes often permit major polluters, such as the state governments' own agencies, or poorer countries, to expand emissions and take jobs, while the SO2 output still floats over the border and causes death.

In practice, political pressure has overcome most such concerns and it is questionable whether this is a capacity that depends on U.S. clout: The Kyoto Protocol established a similar market in global greenhouse gas emissions without U.S. support.

The Community we live as commodity?

This highlights one of the major issues with global commodity markets of either the positive or negative kind. A community must somehow believe that the commodity instrument is real, enforceable, and well worth paying for.
A very substantial part of the anti-globalization movement opposes the commodification of currency, national sovereignty, and traditional cultures. The capacity to repay debt, as in the current global credit money regime anchored by the Bank for International Settlements, does not in their view correspond to measurable benefits to human well-being worldwide. They seek a fairer way for societies to compete in the global markets that will not require conversion of natural capital to natural resources, nor human capital to move to developed nations in order to find work.
Some economic systems by green economists would replace the "gold standard" with a "biodiversity standard". It remains to be seen if such plans have any merit other than as political ways to draw attention to the way capitalism itself interacts with life.
Is human life a commodity? Cloning et all
While classical, neoclassical, and Marxist approaches to economics tend to treat labor differently, they are united in treating nature as a resource.
The green economists and the more conservative environmental economics argue that not only natural ecologies, but also the life of the individual human being is treated as a commodity by the global markets. A good example is the IPCC calculations cited by the Global Commons Institute as placing a value on a human life in the developed world "15x higher" than in the developing world, based solely on the ability to pay to prevent climate change.

Is free time a commodity? Time is money right ?

Accepting this result, some argue that to put a price on both is the most reasonable way to proceed to optimize and increase that value relative to other goods or services. This has led to efforts in measuring well-being, to assign a commercial "value of life", and to the theory of Natural Capitalism - fusions of green and neoclassical approaches - which focus predictably on energy and material efficiency, i.e. using far less of any given commodity input to achieve the same service outputs as a result.
Indian economist Amartya Sen, applying this thinking to human freedom itself, argued in his 1999 book "Development as Freedom" that human free time was the only real service, and that sustainable development was best defined as freeing human time. Sen won The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1999 and based his book on invited lectures he gave at the World Bank