11. Assessing the food security implications of climate change on global food trade

Abstract

As the ripple effects of climate change accelerate through the complex and interdependent global food systems, the widely accepted paradigm that a country’s food security increases with national wealth will be challenged. This threat is particularly relevant for countries that have limited capacity for domestic food production and that rely heavily on imports to meet demand for food. Rising temperatures and extreme weather events are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in many food-exporting countries, causing food price instability and threatening rural livelihoods and sustainable food security. The methodology employed for this analysis was the linkage of The Global Trade, Assistance, and Production (GTAP) Data Base with the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) IMPACT modelling Framework. For this analysis, GTAP data are used for identifying current bilateral trade dynamics, and projections on climate change impacts on food production, demand, and trade for 2050 from IFPRI’s ‘IMPACT Projections of Food Production, Consumption, and Hunger to 2050, with and without climate change: Extended Country-level Results for 2019’ are used. Drawing from the model outputs, a new index was developed to assess the food security vulnerability due to climate change impacts on food trade. In phase 1, Food security was limited to six main food commodity groups: Grains, Rice, Fruits and Vegetable, Oil Seeds, Meat and Milk, and Processed Foods. This paper draws from the IMPACT results for 2050 based on the RCP 8.4 emission scenario and the 3.0 Shared Socio-economic Pathway which shows significant impacts on World Market Prices, total global food production, and trade.