General Comments Among topics for the market's consideration, weather is constantly at the forefront. Agricultural production in various important regions around the world has been beset by weather extremes during the last several years in ways that have climatologists and environmentalists blaming global warming. It may seem as though the incidence of crop production problems resulting from adverse weather has been on the rise, but how precisely true this may be is a question. The situation may be magnified by the ability to instantaneously access detailed worldwide weather data. And of course, publicity surrounding weather-related crop production problems grows whenever the sufficiency of crop supplies is an issue, and this alone has f...