Macroeconomic Drivers of Agricultural Commodity Prices: Evidence from India's Pepper and Turmeric Markets

This study develops an integrated forecasting framework that combines Machine Learning (Random Forest), Deep Learning (LSTM), and Econometric (VECM) approaches to analyse the dynamic behaviour of Indian pepper and turmeric prices. The models incorporate major macroeconomic determinants, including GDP, Consumer Price Index (CPI), exchange rate, gold price, interest rate, trade volume, and foreign institutional investments (FII), to capture both non-linear and long-term relationships. Model performance was evaluated using RMSE, MAE, and MAPE metrics, alongside SHAP-based feature explainability analysis.