Climate and trade-induced risks to global food security

• Applicant: Dr. Kilian Kuhla
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology ; Human Geography
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536251506

In the last two decades, supply failures and associated price spikes from drought-induced crop failures in main production regions that were amplified by uncoordinated unilateral policy responses such as export restrictions led to two major world food price crises. Tens of millions of additional people were pushed into food insecurity, especially in import-dependent low-income countries in Africa and Asia, triggering food riots in some of these countries. Climate and socioeconomic change may put additional pressure on the global food system rendering global crises more likely. This highlights the importance of understanding systemic risks to global and regional food security in order to develop effective adaptation strategies. Agricultural integrated assessment models (IAMs) are well-established workhorses to assess risks to global food security arising from long-term changes in climatic and socioeconomic conditions. However, due to their coarse temporal and regional resolution, they cannot capture short-term risks arising from weather and policy-induced supply failures. In this project, I will focus on short-term risks in the present climate as well as for different climate and socioeconomic futures, while employing the agent-based agricultural trade model Agrimate which I co-developed. Explicitly representing the trade network topography and accounting for commercial and strategic stocks, the model is well suited to describe supply failures and associated price spikes at individual staple grain markets with high (e.g., bi-weekly) temporal resolution and can reproduce historical grain price spikes and associated storage movements of the two recent crises. To analyze the distributional effects of supply failures and price spikes, I will first extend Agrimate by implementing regional consumption agents for different income groups as well as for animal feed and industrial use. Next, I will derive a large ensemble of regional production time series accounting for heat and drought-induced crop failures from multi-crop-model simulations as well as different policy scenarios based on the unilateral policies that countries issued during former crises. Employing Agrimate, I will assess weather and policy-induced short-term food security risks in the present climate and identify hotspot regions with large vulnerable populations. To assess future changes in these risks, I will derive changes in the trade network topography from agricultural IAM runs for different climate and socioeconomic futures and combine them with production time series from multi-crop-model simulations taking these socioeconomic changes into account. This will allow me to assess the (combined) changes in short-term food security risks arising from i) climate-induced production variability, ii) shifts in land-use patterns, and iii) changes in demand. Finally, I will formulate policy recommendations on coping and adaptation strategies to foster global and regional food security.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants