Cassava: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Cassava is a root crop grown in Nigeria, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil, and in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India. Most is eaten locally, while Thailand exports dried chips and starch. Prices follow harvests and maize prices.
No public price Cassava has no public monthly price series: Sold in local markets; no long public world price series.What its price moves with
Cassava starch, or tapioca, is a major source of industrial and food starch, competing with maize starch. Thai exports of tapioca starch link cassava farmers to the world starch market.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Dried cassava chips compete with maize as animal feed and ethanol feedstock in China. When maize is dear, Chinese buyers import more cassava chips from Thailand and Vietnam, lifting farm prices there and in other exporting countries.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Thailand and China make ethanol from cassava, so fuel blending policy adds demand for the crop. Ethanol prices in turn follow the petrol they replace, which ties cassava loosely to oil, though no correlation can be measured here.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Potato and cassava starches compete for paper, food and textile uses, and buyers switch when one is cheaper. Where both serve as staple foods, as in parts of Africa and India, they also substitute in diets.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.