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Category: Climate Change

More Frequent Spikes in Food Prices in the Future?

From Deutsche Bank, via the Wall Street Journal:

“Food prices are likely to start falling later in 2011 but will remain high for the rest of this decade (…) We expect spikes in food prices to occur with increasing frequency, mostly due to weather disruption and climate change.”

In sum, the food price level is expected to remain high on average, but food price volatility is expected to increase? If so, agricultural producers will be the ones who suffer more than consumers.

Does Adaptation to Climate Change Provide Food Security?

That’s the title of a new paper by Di Falco et al. in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (a previous, ungated version can be found here, but note that the two versions differ substantially):

“We examine the driving forces behind farm households’ decisions to adapt to climate change, and the impact of adaptation on farm households’ food productivity. We estimate a simultaneous equations model with endogenous switching to account for the heterogeneity in the decision to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm. Access to credit, extension and information are found to be the main drivers behind adaptation. We find that adaptation increases food productivity, that the farm households that did not adapt would benefit the most from adaptation.”

This is a very interesting research question and that the core result is interesting (and no, I was not a referee for this paper, nor do I know the authors.) From skimming the paper, however, I’m not sure the relationship between adaptation to climate change and productivity is causal. Because the remainder of this post is pretty technical, I am putting it under the fold.