Commodity price shocks

[1] During the international Post-Napoleonic Depression (1815–1821) following the conclusion of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), wheat and other grain prices fell by half in Ireland, and alongside continued population growth, landlords converted cropland into rangeland by securing the passage of tenant farmer eviction legislation in 1816, which led, because of the Irish workforce's historic concentration in agriculture, to a greater subdivision of remaining land plots under tillage and increasingly less efficient and less profitable subsistence farms.

With the onset of the Great Recession, reduced demand for oil caused the price to fall to $39 per barrel in December 2008.

[4] The 2007–2008 world food price crisis saw corn, wheat, and rice go up by a factor of three when measured in US dollars.

Amongst these, the transition of China's economy to more sustainable levels of growth and the shale-energy boom in the United States were the dominant demand-side and supply-side factors governing the downturn in global commodity prices.

The main cause is due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which has reduced demand along with storage issues and the expiration of the May contract the following day.