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The role of international trade in managing food security risks from climate change

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Abstract

International trade plays an important role in facilitating global food security in the face of a changing climate. In considering this issue, it is useful to distinguish between two different time scales: inter-annual and inter-decadal. Inter-annual adjustments in international trade can play an important role in shifting supplies from food surplus regions to regions facing food deficits which emerge as a consequence of extreme weather events, civil strife, and/or other disruptions The first section of the paper explores the evidence on increased inter-annual supply side volatility, as well as historical and prospective analyses of adaptation to such volatility and the role international trade can play in mitigating the adverse impacts on food security. In the long run, we expect that the fundamental patterns of comparative advantage will be altered by the changing climate as well as availability of technology and endowments (water for irrigation, labor force, capital stock). In a freely functioning global economy, long run trade patterns will respond to this evolving comparative advantage. However, historical food trade has not been free of obstacles, with both tariff and non-tariff barriers often limiting the adjustment of trade to the changing economic landscape. This section of the paper capitalizes on a newly available library of climate impact results in order to characterize the tails (both optimistic and pessimistic) of this distribution. We then explore the potential for a more freely functioning global trading system to deliver improved long run food security in 2050.

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Notes

  1. At the time of this writing, oil prices have been falling. However, this may be a transitory phenomenon.

  2. Early work by FAO (Neiken 2003) found that the log-normal distribution has a better fit of household data on caloric consumption compared to other distributions. The log-normal is also widely used in the poverty literature to calculate the poverty headcount and poverty incidence (see Foster et al. (1984)) and similar indices can be constructed to measure the incidence and headcount of caloric undernutrition.

  3. These consist of HADGEM2-ES, IPSL-CM5A-LR, MIROC-ESM-CHEM, GFDL-ESM2M, NorESM1-M. For convenience, these models are mentioned in the paper as HADGEM, IPSL, MIROC, GFDL, NORESM, respectively.

  4. The EPIC model also has sufficient data but it is not available in the version of the AgMIP tool that we used in this study.

  5. In Baldos and Hertel (2014) wherein market barriers are ignored, the baseline malnutrition counts by 2050 in Sub Saharan Africa and in South Asia are around 47 M to 26 M persons, respectively. The ranges of malnutrition counts relative to the future baseline given climate change are around −16 M to 13 M persons for Sub Saharan Africa and −7 M to 5 M for South Asia.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support for the underlying research into the climate-food-energy-land-water nexus from U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Integrated Assessment Research Program, Grant No. DE-SC005171.

This paper was part of a workshop sponsored by the OECD Co-operative Research Programme on Biological Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University, 403 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Uris Lantz C. Baldos & Thomas W. Hertel

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  1. Uris Lantz C. Baldos
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  2. Thomas W. Hertel
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Correspondence to Uris Lantz C. Baldos.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 5
figure 5

Regional food security impacts of climate change under different trade regimes given LPJmL crop model and HADGEM GCM model. Green lower and red upper bounds (with and without CO2 fertilization effects, respectively) represent deviations in regional malnutrition count relative to the 2050 baseline without climate change

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Food security impacts of climate change in Sub Saharan Africa under different trade regimes for each crop model and GCM model combination. Green lower and red upper bounds (with and without CO2 fertilization effects, respectively) represent deviations in regional malnutrition count relative to the 2050 baseline without climate change

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Food security impacts of climate change in South Asia under different trade regimes for each crop model and GCM model combination. Green lower and red upper bounds (with and without CO2 fertilization effects, respectively) represent deviations in regional malnutrition count relative to the 2050 baseline without climate change

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Fig. 8
figure 8

Food security impacts of climate change in the Rest of the World under different trade regimes for each crop model and GCM model combination. Green lower and red upper bounds (with and without CO2 fertilization effects, respectively) represent deviations in regional malnutrition count relative to the 2050 baseline without climate change

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Fig. 9
figure 9

Contributions of key drivers of agriculture to changes in global malnutrition count under the LPJmL crop model and HADGEM GCM model for different trade regimes. White bars shows the change in the number of malnourished persons from 2006 to 2050 while the colored bars highlight the contribution of the key drivers of agriculture to the changes in global malnutrition count

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Baldos, U.L.C., Hertel, T.W. The role of international trade in managing food security risks from climate change. Food Sec. 7, 275–290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-015-0435-z

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