Abstract
Climate change and extreme climatic events cause massive food grain loss, which adversely impacts food availability, food import, and other economic factors. Bangladesh has been combating climate variability and extreme climatic events to abate agricultural production loss for a long time. In this article, we investigated the relationship between food grain loss and food security with reference to extreme climatic events in Bangladesh, based on data from 1984 to 2017. We used the vector auto-regression (VAR) model and derivative analyses, and suggested policy implications related to the existing national agricultural policy. Five time-series variables were judiciously considered: food availability, food loss, food import, gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, and inflation rate. The results show that the variable, food grain loss has a reverse association with food security—it escalates import from the world food market, causing import-dependence. Moreover, food loss significantly instigates inflation. However, the GDP growth rate was found to be a weak provocateur. Overall, climate change and climatic extremes jeopardize the country’s food security and hinder its pursuit of the sustainable development goals, especially stand-alone goals 1 and 2. Therefore, it is concluded that changes in climate and their correlations are detrimental to Bangladesh’s food security and economy.
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Notes
In FY (July–June) 2015–2016, total production of cereal food was 37.16 MMt, which included cereals such as maize, jowar, barley, and bajra; total rice production was 33.36 MMt and total wheat production was 1.35 MMt. The ratio of rice to wheat production was approximately 25:1, that is, 96% rice and 4% wheat (BBS 2017).
The definition of food security has been continually evolving since the birth of the concept. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “food security refers to when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (2002).
In FY 2017–2018, the government and private importers together imported 9774 Mt of rice and wheat using foreign aid from international organizations (MoF 2020).
As an illustration, the rice price shocks in 2007 and 2008. According to Srinivasan and Jha (1999), a 1 MMt increase in rice export or import by India can impact the world rice market price by 4.7%.
Climatic hazards are disaster agents affecting human settlements and the environment. Hazardous atmospheric phenomena encompass flood, drought, cyclone, thunderstorm, hailstorm, extreme precipitation, extreme temperatures, heat weaves, etc.
From the geo-morphological standpoint, approximately 80% of the country is floodplains; the remaining is hills. Besides, it has the Bay of Bengal in the south, encompassing 19 administrative districts out of the country’s 64, and measuring 42,750 km2 of coastal zones, which provide livelihood to 40 million people. According to the Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC) of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, on average, 76%, 16%, and 8% of its citizens are affected by floods, cyclones, and droughts, respectively.
Based on the climate of Bangladesh (sub-tropical monsoon), the Bangla calendar year is traditionally divided into six seasons: summer (mid-April to mid-June); monsoon (mid-June to mid-August); autumn (mid-August to mid-October); late autumn (mid-October to mid-December); winter (mid-December to mid-February); and spring (mid-February to mid-April) (Banglapedia 2021). However, from a meteorological perspective, there are three distinct seasons: summer (March–June); monsoon (June–October); and winter (October–March).
In Bangladesh, rice is cultivated throughout the year; broadcast Aus rice is cultivated from early March to late August; transplanted Aus rice from April to August; broadcast Aman rice from late February to November; transplanted Aman rice from July to late December; and Boro rice from January to late June (IUCN 2002).
The Augmented Dickey–Fuller and Phillips–Perron tests are two distinct techniques widely used by economists to test the existence of unit root in the time-series when observations are correlated serially. The methods were proposed by Dickey and Fuller (1979) and Phillips and Perron (1988), respectively. The drama of these two approaches is that they construct their own test statistics, and emit asymptotic distributions and simulated critical values for varying test and sample sizes. For more information and elaborated explanation, please surf the original textbook and valid as well as standard sources.
Clive Granger proposed an approach for testing causality. One of the most accepted maxims for econometrician and statistician is: “correlation does not mean causality.” Correlation or covariance is a symmetric or bivariate relation, that is, cov (x, y = cov (y, x), and generally, we cannot infer anything about the direction of causality between x and y by observing non-zero covariance. The distribution of yt is thought by the lagging value of yt and xt. Whenever a variable y cannot help forecast another variable x, we can say that y does not Granger cause x. In other words, y fails to Granger cause x if for all s > 0, the mean-squared error (MSE) of a forecast of xt+s based on (xt, xt−1 …) is as same as the MSE of forecast of xt+s that uses both (xt, xt−1…) and (yt, yt−1…).
The word “affect” is employed in the same sense as Granger causality.
The word “influence” is also used as parallel to the Granger causality.
The IRFs delineate the mutual relation of the system to trace the effect of a shock or innovation to one endogenous variable on the others. More specifically, they measure the dynamic marginal effects of each impulse or innovation or shock on all of the variables over time.
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Acknowledgements
The authors express their sincere thanks and gratitude to Prof. Dr. Moazzem Hossain, Griffith University, Australia, for their valuable comments and insights that substantially improved the manuscript. We would also like to express our gratitude to Prof. Kazuhiro Ota and Prof. Atushi Ushimaru for their advice at various stages of writing this article. Of course, all mistakes and errors of omission and commission remain our own.
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The activities have been performed for the development of this manuscript by the authors as follows: MSI: conceptualization, data collection, formal analysis, methodology, and original drafting. MS: conceptualization, supervision, resources, software, and review and editing. KO: validation, visualization, and review and editing. AHMSI: conceptualization, visualization, and review and editing.
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Islam, M.S., Okubo, K., Islam, A.H.M.S. et al. Investigating the effect of climate change on food loss and food security in Bangladesh. SN Bus Econ 2, 4 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43546-021-00177-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43546-021-00177-z