In 2018, in the midst of the longest economic expansion in US history, national and international media outlets were citing commodity prices and financial stress as significant factors affecting the mental health of US farmers.
Most such stories drew parallels between then-current agricultural conditions and the conditions faced by farmers during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when 900 farmers died by suicide in response to farm debt doubling in the early 1980s. As a result, those same stories often emphasized farmer suicides and the unique set of risk factors associated with agriculture, noting that, between 2014 and 2018, 450 farmers had killed themselves.
That got me thinking: Are farmers especially at risk for mental health issues? After all, even with all of the agricultural protection policies in place, agricultural producers are still considerably more exposed to fluctuations in their revenue than most other people in the population. Could it be that negative commodity price shocks can have such negative effects on the welfare of producers that it can lead to increase in mortality among those producers and those who livelihoods depend on the welfare of those producers?
After six years, my coauthors Jhih-Yun Liu (University of Conecticut), Joleen Hadrich (University of Minnesota), and I are proud to release a paper in which we look at the relationship between commodity prices and mortality. You can find that paper here, and here is the abstract:
The US Midwest, which is home to over 20 percent of Americans, is heavily dependent on the primary sector of the economy, especially agriculture. We look at the relationship between commodity pricess—corn and soybean prices, the dominant commodities in the Midwests—and mortality in a sample of 485 Midwestern counties for the period 1980 to 2016. As outcome variables, we look at crude or age-adjusted all-cause death rates. Because commodity prices are only available at the state or global level, we interact (i) state-level or global commodity prices with (ii) how much of each commodity is grown within each county. Our treatment variable thus captures how, for each commodity, revenues from that commodity within a given county change in response to changes in commodity prices. For identification, we combine the exposure design just described with a two-way, county and year fixed effects design as well as with a number of robust panel data estimators. On average, we find that a decrease in commodity prices is associated with increased mortality across all counties: A 10-percent decrease in either corn or soybean revenues is associated with an increase in the crude death rate of about 0.2 percent, or 0.205 additional deaths per 1,000 persons in a county. This result appears driven by rural counties and by corn price shocks. For robustness, we also estimate specifications in which we instrument revenues from each commodity with measures of drought severity, and we conduct falsification tests. Finally, we show that the relationship between commodity prices and rural mortality appears driven by cardiovascular disease and by suicides.