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Matthias Kalkuhl · Joachim von Braun
Maximo Torero Editors
Food Price
Volatility and Its
Implications for
Food Security
and Policy
Food Price Volatility and Its Implications
for Food Security and Policy
Matthias Kalkuhl • Joachim von Braun •
Maximo Torero
Editors
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016. The book is published with open access.
Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 2.5 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/) which permits any
noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s)
and source are credited.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative Commons
license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative
Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to
obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made.
Eight years ago the global food crisis caught most governments and academic
researchers unprepared. The crisis triggered not only extensive research on drivers
of international food price shocks and volatility but also many policy interventions
and tentative institutional reform at the global and national scale. Despite the efforts
of national governments and international organizations in recent years to halve
the number of hungry people by 2015, about 800 million people still suffer from
undernutrition and many more from micronutrient deficiencies. This impedes health
and contributes to conflicts and sluggish economic development. Ending hunger
completely by 2030 as aimed for in the Sustainable Development Goals requires
a much stronger political commitment. Moreover, it needs a solid scientific base
for understanding the threats to food and nutrition security and their complex
interactions with social, environmental, and political factors. Globalization has
created a highly interconnected world where resources, information, and policies
are not constrained by national borders. Economic shocks spread quickly over entire
industries and sectors. At the same time, environmental risks triggered by climate
change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and water scarcity as well as political
conflicts will increasingly become a force of disruption, threatening the reliability of
our global agricultural and food production system. Drastic price changes are often
the first signs indicating upcoming crises and recent calm agricultural markets can
be deceptive and lead to unjustified complacency.
Analyzing Food Price Volatility and its Implications for Food Security and Policy,
edited by Matthias Kalkuhl, Joachim von Braun, and Maximo Torero, is devoted to
the stability dimension of food security and in particular the causes, consequences,
and remedies related to extreme events in food markets. Volatility is a measure of
risk and uncertainty which, in turn, is the antagonist of security. Price volatility is
an intrinsically market-related economic concept. The economics of this book is,
however, carefully embedded into the political, agricultural, climate, and nutritional
domains. This makes the book an important contribution for the ongoing political
agenda of the international community to reduce undernutrition and enhance food
and nutrition security.
The first chapter, which is written by the editors, provides a comprehensive
overview of the recent debates, concepts, and literature and serves as an overview of
the subject of the book. Subsequent chapters emphasize the global and multi-market
v
vi Foreword
The work presented in this book is the result of intensive research coopera-
tion between the Center for Development Research (ZEF) and the International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and their research partners all over the
world.
Part of the research of this book had not been possible without the support
of the Ethiopian Economics Association, in particular Assefa Admassie and Seid
Nuru Ali, of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations,
especially Anwarul Hoda and Ashok Gulati, and of the Institute of Statistical, Social
and Economic Research of the University of Ghana, headed by Felix Asante. These
institutes and persons proved to be reliable and very helpful partners for the field
research and case-study analyses.
Other work in this book depends on secondary data where FAO GIEWS is a
major provider granting us access to price, supply, and demand data for developing
countries. We would in particular acknowledge the comments, discussions, and data
support from David Hallam, Liliana Balbi, Felix Baquedano, and Paul Racionzer
from the Trade and Markets Division (EST) at FAO. We further thank Sonja Perakis
from FEWS.NET for providing additional price data.
Exchange and discussion of ongoing work at seminars at ZEF helped to advance
our research on volatility and food security substantially. We would like to thank
Nicolas Gerber, Christopher L. Gilbert, Christophe Gouel, Ulrich Hiemenz, Alisher
Mirzabaev, Neil Pearson, Simone Pfuderer, Shahidur Rashid, Randall Romero-
Aguilar, and Christian Schlag.
We are grateful to Peter Zhuang and Athene Cook for language editing and
proofreading of the book and to Tobias Heimann for formatting the chapters.
Katharina Gallant provided very helpful support for finalizing the book in its latest
stages.
Much of the research in this book was part of the research project “Volatility
in Commodity Markets, Trade and the Poor” financed by the Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ). Additional support
came from the research project “FoodSecure” financed by the European Commis-
sion. Co-funding of particular contributions was provided by Bayer CropScience
AG and Union Investment and by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies,
Institutions, and Markets, as well as the Center for Development Research (ZEF).
vii
viii Acknowledgments
We thank all of these funders for their financial support, emphasizing that they
are not responsible for the specific content and interpretations of our research. We
also acknowledge the financial support from the BMZ for the publication of this
book.
Part I Introduction
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security,
and Policy: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Matthias Kalkuhl, Joachim von Braun, and Maximo Torero
Price volatility describes the magnitude of price fluctuations or the risk of large,
unexpected price changes. The risk of extreme price events can intensify and
contribute to broader social risks in terms of food security, human development,
and political stability. The aim of this book is to investigate the causal relationships
between and the drivers of price volatility and extreme price events, in particular
their implications on food and nutrition security. This book also aims to investigate
the experiences with and implications of national and international policies aimed
at preventing and mitigating volatility.
The economic history of food price crises has been studied in detail by Abel
(1966). He found that the causes of food price crises had changed with changing
political and economic contexts, such as the transmission of crises from agriculture
to urban settings, and the prevalence of regional crises changed due more or less
to the integration of markets. Analyses of the global food price crises of the 1970s
focused on production and trade shocks (e.g., Valdes 1981), and the broader concept
of food security evolved. Revisiting food price volatility in our age is necessary
because of further contextual changes and advancements in methods of studying
cause and effect.
Concern about food price volatility is closely connected to the concept of food
security, i.e., its four pillars of food availability, economic and physical access
to food, food utilization, and stability (vulnerability and shocks) over time (FAO
1996, 2015). The slow progress in reducing hunger and malnutrition and the role
of volatile agricultural markets in the food crises of 2007/2008 and 2010 fueled
concerns about the stability and reliability of the global food system. This book,
however, emphasizes that the abovementioned four dimensions of the food security
concept should be viewed not only as four separate building blocks but also as
a system of complex dynamic interactions. Price shock-related food and nutrition
insecurity may undermine the resilience of poor people and low-income countries
and thus exacerbate economic insecurity, often eroding societal cohesion.
Food policy is a sensitive political issue, and it is becoming increasingly so
as the world becomes more urbanized with increased concentrations of political
voice near power centers. Moreover, food policy is affected by strong normative
beliefs not only about goals—like food security—but also about instruments to
achieve these goals. Recommendations about how to deal with volatility need to
consider the specific policy context (Pinstrup-Andersen 2015). When food prices
rise, the power of political leaders may become contested. Rising onion prices
changed election outcomes in India.1 Increasing food prices caused thousands of
protesters to take the streets of Port au Prince (in 2008) and Algiers (in 2011).2
Rising food prices led the Haitian prime minister to resign from office in April
2008 and fueled the protests for a political change in several Arab countries. The
2007/2008 crisis also generated social and political turmoil in Bangladesh, Côte
d’Ivoire, Egypt, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Several other countries saw
violent food riots, demonstrations, or social unrest as a result of rising food prices.
Beyond the anecdotal evidence and the correlation between international prices,
excessive price spikes, and food riots depicted in Fig. 1.1, recent empirical research
suggests a causal relationship between food prices and social unrest (Bellemare
2015). Many governments of developing countries are held responsible for ensuring
a certain degree of food security and decent living conditions. When these basic
requirements are eroded, governments could quickly lose their legitimacy, and
unrests and protests could arise especially in urban areas, where coordinating a
collective protest action is easy. Thus, the scope of the protests could also broaden
and trigger the demand for deeper institutional and political reforms (Costello et al.
2015).
As food prices are a sensitive political issue, it is not surprising that governments
and the G20 aim to quickly respond to increasing prices. Much of this response has
been only partly effective—or it even contributed to increasing volatility elsewhere
[see Martin and Anderson (2012) for the case of trade policies]. This is partly
based on a collective action failure to coordinate policies such that they re-enforce
1
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-25/for-indias-inflation-crisis-see-onion-prices
2
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12134307 and http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/
apr/09/11
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview 5
300 10
Cerals: Share of Days with Excessive Price Spikes [in %] (Left Axis)
# Food riots in Africa (Right Axis) 9
FAO Cereals Price Index [2002-2004=100] (Left Axis)
250
8
7
200
6
150 5
4
100
3
2
50
1
0 0
2002q2
2002q3
2002q4
2003q1
2003q2
2003q3
2003q4
2004q1
2004q2
2004q3
2004q4
2005q1
2005q2
2005q3
2005q4
2006q1
2006q2
2006q3
2006q4
2007q1
2007q2
2007q3
2007q4
2008q1
2008q2
2008q3
2008q4
2009q1
2009q2
2009q3
2009q4
2010q1
2010q2
2010q3
2010q4
2011q1
2011q2
2011q3
2011q4
2012q1
2012q2
2012q3
2012q4
Fig. 1.1 Food prices, excessive volatility, and social unrests. Note: Average share of days with
excessive price spikes for maize, wheat, and rice futures returns as reported by IFPRI’s NEXQ
model (see explanation below in the text). All values per quarter. Source: Own illustration based
on data from foodsecurityportal.org (excessive volatility), Social Conflict in Africa Database
(SCAD)3 , and FAO
rather than neutralize each other. On the other hand, increasing integration of local
agricultural markets into global markets and of agricultural markets into broader
financial asset markets makes it more difficult to identify the causes of extreme
events. The traditional agricultural supply and demand fundamentals seem to have
only little explanatory power for recent price movements. Energy prices and biofuel
demand, interest rates and monetary policy, financial investments and speculation,
sudden trade restriction, or lack of information are some of the factors which are
considered to be important determinants of agricultural markets in recent times.
Without a proper understanding of the causal relations, excessive volatility can-
not be reduced effectively. This book presents research on these causal relationships,
their relevance, and policy implications to provide a better information base for
political decision makers at the national and international level.
Food security is commonly defined as a state whereby “[ : : : ] all people, at all times,
have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet
their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO 1996,
paragraph 1). The definition of nutrition security goes even beyond that of food
3
We thank Regine Weber for preparing the SCAD data.
6 M. Kalkuhl et al.
security by postulating that “[a] person is considered nutrition secure when she or he
has a nutritionally adequate diet and the food consumed is biologically utilized such
that adequate performance is maintained in growth, resisting or recovering from
disease, pregnancy, lactation and physical work.” The Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) of the post-2015 development agenda give food and nutrition security
a high priority. Despite the efforts of governments and international organizations,
the number of people affected by food and nutrition insecurity remains high, with
780 million people undernourished and about two billion malnourished (FAO 2015).
On an operational level, food security is conceptualized by the four dimensions:
availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability [see also Upton et al. (2015) for
new approaches to conceptualize food security measurements]. The availability
of food, measured by the total food supply, and access to food, measured—for
example—by real income of households (relative to food prices), are necessary
but not sufficient conditions to ensure food security. Hence, they should not be
considered as the only determinants of food security; they are only a subset of a
much broader list of causal determinants of food security (von Braun 2014). What
ultimately matters for the well-being and health of individuals is the extent to which
each person is able to meet their dietary needs (including micro- and macronutrients)
and qualitative or subjective food preferences. This ability—subsumed under the
utilization dimension—is affected by intra-household allocation and distribution
decisions, cultural or behavioral values, and complementary factors like diseases
or other circumstances that require specific diets. While utilization is the decisive
dimension for food security on the individual level, it is difficult and expensive to
measure, which hinders the use of indicators focusing on food availability (e.g., per
capita calorie supply) or accessibility (e.g., share of households with insufficient
income to meet food and nutrition demands).
The first three dimensions of the standard food security framework focus on
issues at different socioeconomic scales. The fourth pillar emphasizes the temporal
dimension—the stability of the conditions that enable individuals to meet their food
demand. The stability can be affected in various ways: harvest fluctuations (that are
often moderated by trade and storage), fluctuations in real income affecting access
to food and nutrients, and fluctuations in disease burdens (e.g., due to pandemics or
floods). In any of these cases, changes in food prices are likely to signal changes in
food security conditions. As prices are endogenous outcomes of underlying market
forces, they cannot be a fundamental cause of changing food security conditions—a
qualification that should be kept in mind and is highly important for policymaking.
High prices could signal expectations of low food availability, which could severely
threaten food security as policy intervention is limited in the short run (at least
if the scarcity arises on a global scale). High prices could, however, also signal
increasing demand for food, to which policymakers can better respond with a wide
set of instruments ranging from trade policies, taxes targeted at wealthy consumers
to transfers targeted at poor consumers. As poor people spend around two-third of
their income on food, a change in food prices implies a change in real income; the
direction of the change in real income depends on a household’s trade position:
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview 7
Net sellers of food benefit from price increases, while net buyers would experience
declining real wages in the short run.
Temporary deficiencies in food access can lead to long-term, irreversible nutri-
tional damage, especially among children. For example, across several Latin
American countries, simulations of the 2007/2008 price increases showed important
reductions in calorie intake at both the national and the household levels, especially
for children from poor households below the age of two, a critical period for a
child’s growth and development (Robles and Torero 2010). In all of the Latin
American countries studied, poorer households with consumption levels that were
already below the calorie adequacy threshold showed greater reductions in calorie
intake. The long-term effects are especially detrimental to the already vulnerable
populations. Other empirical work confirmed significant nutritional impacts of
short-term disruptions in food security: Higher food prices increased the instances
of underweight children in Mozambique (Arndt et al. 2012); the prevalence of
childhood stunting increased in El Salvador after the 2008 food price increase (de
Brauw 2011); harvest failures and adverse weather events have been associated with
impeded child growth in Zimbabwe (Hoddinott and Kinsey 2001), reduced weight
in children in Côte d’Ivoire (Jensen 2000), and decreased blood concentration of
vitamin A and vitamin E in mothers in Zambia (Gitau et al. 2005). The deterioration
of nutritional status has, in turn, long-term impacts on health, stature, and cognitive
capabilities (Victora et al. 2008). Malnutrition in the form of insufficient micronu-
trient intake increases the probability of lifetime disabilities, such as blindness due
to vitamin A deficiency (Black et al. 2008).
Despite the heterogeneity in linking prices to changes in underlying food security
determinants, there are three reasons why prices are so important for understanding
and assessing food security risks: First, they are closely linked to several causal
factors of food security (supply, real income, cross-market linkages); second, they
are observed more frequently and less costly to collect than most other food security
indicators; and third, prices convey expectations about future changes and risks by
a large set of market participants, which allows researchers to exploit the large
information processing capacity of markets (Fama 1970). These three features
make price dynamics a crucial element for understanding food security risks. It
is therefore the main objective of this book to understand the stability dimension
of food security from the lens of agricultural market linkages and food prices by
studying their trends, changes, extreme spikes, and volatility. Chapter 2 provides a
detailed overview of several techniques for decomposing price series and calculating
volatility for empirical analysis. In the following section, we will briefly explain the
different concepts of volatility used in this book.
In a broad sense, volatility captures the idea that prices fluctuate around a rather
stable long-term price or price trend (Hull 2012). These short-term fluctuations
may refer to daily, weekly, or monthly prices. Periods of excessively high or low
8 M. Kalkuhl et al.
commodity prices are often associated with crises as they pose a challenge to
producers, consumers, and policymakers. The concept of volatility captures the idea
of price fluctuations in two different ways: in a historical (ex-post) perspective and
in a forward-looking (ex-ante) perspective.
Ex-post volatility measures realized variability; it refers to unconditional volatil-
ity measures that do not control for lagged prices or lagged volatility. Ex-post
volatility is also typically calculated over a longer time horizon consisting of
several price observations. In contrast, dynamic models of conditional volatility use
available information at time t to provide a forecast of price volatility at time t C 1.
As conditional volatility measures change over time, they are dynamic and forward-
looking and thus able to represent changing risk perceptions.
Table 1.1 lists several measures of volatility which are grouped into two
basic approaches: (1) ex-post, or unconditional measures that assume a constant
variance in the data generating process, and (2) forward-looking (conditional or
dynamic) measures which use changes in past prices and variances to forecast
future variances. Although there is some difference between unconditional volatility
measures when considering inflation and trends, the two ex-post indicators are
correlated and not fundamentally different (Huchet-Bourdon 2011). With respect
to forward-looking volatility measures, Generalized Autoregressive Conditional
Heteroskedastic (GARCH) methods are widely used (Hull 2012). They estimate
volatility conditional on past shocks and volatility. Multivariate GARCH models
also allow volatility (risk) spillovers from other markets or commodities to be
considered (see, e.g., Rapsomanikis and Mugera 2011; Hernandez et al. 2014).
The risk of price changes can also be derived implicitly from financial market
data (Prakash 2011). Put and call options give holders the right to sell or buy a
security (e.g., a commodity futures contract) at a specified price. The higher the
expected volatility (risk of price changes), the more valuable an option becomes
because it gives the right (but not the obligation) to sell or buy at a pre-defined
price. Using the Black–Scholes option pricing formula and other observable data
(the exercise price, current price, risk-free rate, and maturity of an option), it is
possible to calculate the volatility which the market is expecting. As the Black–
Scholes formula rests on the strong assumption of log-normally distributed returns
with constant variance, it is questionable whether the formula is an accurate measure
of the market expectations on volatility. Duan (1995), for example, reconstructed
the original option pricing model to incorporate conditional volatilities. The last
column in Table 1.1 lists nonparametric volatility models that do not assume a
specific functional form for estimating volatility; these models are therefore even
more flexible and precise in forecasting volatility than parametric GARCH models.
An example of nonparametric models is the one developed by Martins-Filho et al.
(2015).
The choice of the “right” volatility measure depends on the context, data
availability, and research question. Ex-post volatility can easily be calculated for
time series with a low number of observations and/or missing observations (both
issues plague most price data from developing countries). Unconditional measures
can provide an appropriate tool for studying the impact of realized past shocks.
Table 1.1 Different measures of volatility
Ex-post volatility measures (unconditional/realized
variability) Ex-ante/forward-looking volatility and risk measures (conditional/dynamic volatility)
Standard deviation of log Coefficient of variation from Conditional volatility Implied volatility Nonparametric volatility and
returns mean or trend p (GARCH) extreme quantile models
V D SD Œrt V D SDŒppt tpt n2 D P C D f 2; rt D m .Xt / C 2 .Xt / "t
q
V
PpL C iD1 ˛i "2ni C r > q .˛jXt /
2
ˇ
iD1 i ni
Considers constant time Using CPI deflated prices or Volatility n2 conditional on Perception of market about Nonparametric estimation of
trend of prices detrended prices pt avoids past volatilities and future volatility (price risk) volatility 2 .Xt /; extreme
bias due to inflation or long-term volatility VL return if return higher than
long-term trends the ˛-quantile
Gilbert and Morgan (2010) Bellemare (2015), Rapsomanikis and Mugera Prakash (2011) Martins-Filho et al. (2015)
Huchet-Bourdon (2011) (2011), Hernandez et al.
(2014)
pt
Note: rt D log pt1
(log returns)
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview
9
10 M. Kalkuhl et al.
Extreme events refer to “unusual” events that are unlikely to occur frequently and
whose occurrence can have major adverse impacts. The condition that extreme
events are rare (or have been rare in the past) is important: Because their occurrence
lies outside the sphere of normality, it is difficult (and expensive) to prepare for
and cope with them (Sarris 2014). This difficulty does not only refer to individuals,
firms, or public institutions (governments) but also to markets that are not always
able to provide insurance against extreme events (e.g., Jaffee and Russell 1997).
A common way to conceptualize extreme events is to relate them to higher-order
quantiles of a probability distribution, as illustrated in Fig. 1.2. Typically, events
outside a certain quantile (gray-shaded area) are classified as extreme events. As
they are so rare, even in countries with developed financial systems, insurances
are not available. Whenever (private) insurances are not available, public insurance
through government programs or policies might increase welfare. This includes also
the case whereby a government alters the shape of the probability distribution, for
example, due to public stockholding programs that prevent extreme price shocks.
As insurance is costly and can be impaired by moral hazard and adverse selection
problems, not all events should be covered by insurance (or not all volatility should
be reduced through government intervention). This is indicated by the risk retention
layer, in which households or societies can handle price changes. In practice, it is
often challenging to determine the thresholds between the risk layers and optimal
levels of interventions. They depend on risk preferences, development of insurance
markets, self-insurance and coping possibilities, and the costs of insurance.
A common threshold used in statistical analysis is, for example, the 95 %
quantile. This means, on average, only 5 % of the observed price changes will be
above that threshold. Given the critical threshold, classifying an event as extreme
requires knowing the variance of the probability distribution, i.e., the volatility.
This is where the different concepts of volatility discussed above become relevant.
Depending on the volatility measure used, a significant price increase, such as a
30 % increase within 1 month, may or may not be considered as excessive. With the
aim of developing a statistically consistent measure of excessive volatility, Martins-
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview 11
relative frequency
Fig. 1.2 Risk layers and extreme events. Source: Own illustration based on World Bank (2005)
and Sarris (2014)
Filho et al. (2015) have developed the nonparametric extreme quantile (NEXQ)
model that identifies extreme price variability based on a dynamic evolution of
daily returns over time using historical data going back to 1954. The model is then
combined with the extreme value theory to estimate higher-order quantiles of the
return series, allowing any particular realized return (i.e., effective return in the
futures market) to be classified either as extremely high or not.4
Various chapters of this book deal with specific subsets of underlying causes of
food price volatility and impacts on food security. Figure 1.3 depicts the broader
conceptual framework embracing the subsequent analyses. As already mentioned,
food price volatility is deeply related to markets where goods and services are
exchanged and where prices are formed. Food markets cannot be considered in
isolation: Spatially separated markets are linked through trade; food markets are
influenced by commodity, asset, and financial markets; and these, in turn, influence
4
The application of this volatility measure to most relevant agricultural futures contracts is
publicly available under www.foodsecurityportal.org/policy-analysis-tools/excessive-food-price-
variability-early-warning-system
12 M. Kalkuhl et al.
supply… frame…
Producers Consumers
Commercial farmers Food prices Wage earners
Subsistence farmers Subsistence farmers
Weather and pests Labor market shocks
Inputs
Processors
Fertilizer Commodity prices Food & feed
Energy
Bioenergy
Capital
Energy prices
Macroeconomic shocks
Fig. 1.3 Conceptual framework of the casual impacts of price volatility. Source: Own illustration
trading and allocation decisions of actors that also engage in food markets. Because
of the complex interlinkages and interactions between several actors and economic
sectors, food prices are not the mere result of farmers’ supply and consumers’
demand, and price volatility is not solely determined by harvest and income shocks.
Food and feed processors form part of the agricultural value chain, as do biofuel
refineries. Seeds, fertilizers, crop protection, and machinery are important inputs
in the agricultural production process which increase productivity but may also
increase financial risk because input investments have to be paid out of uncertain
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview 13
Because of the increasing market interlinkages across spatial and sectoral scales,
understanding market risks and price volatility has become more complex. There is
also the popular notion that market integration increases volatility, but there is little
compelling evidence supporting the notion: Volatility of international commodity
prices is not high compared to historical levels (see Chap. 2 by Díaz-Bonilla and
Jacks et al. 2011). Also in African countries, volatility has not increased in the
last decade (Minot 2014). Linking spatially separated markets, trade allows excess
supply to be exported and grains to be imported in times of need. Diverting grains to
biofuel production can reduce volatility and help stabilize food prices if conversion
quantities are anticyclical to food prices.
However, export markets for all staple commodities—rice, maize, wheat, and
soybeans—are highly concentrated in a few countries or very thin (i.e., only a
small share of production is traded). In the case of both maize and rice, the top
five producers account for more than 70 % of the global production, and the
top five exporters account for about 80 % of total world exports. For wheat, the
top five producers and exporters account for about 50 and 60 % of the global
production and exports, respectively. These high levels of concentration imply that
the world’s capacity for coping with geographical risk is limited. Any weather shock
or exogenous shock to production in these countries will immediately have an effect
on global prices and price volatility.
Although market integration may reduce rather than increase volatility, it
increases volatility spillovers. This makes it more difficult to respond to volatility
and crises as causal effects become more complex and interlinked with the wider
macroeconomic environment. Policy response cannot focus only on storing and
releasing grains for balancing supply and demand, e.g., using public stocks.
Governments affect the performance of markets through the infrastructure and
information services they provide (Kornher and Kalkuhl 2013). By affecting
inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates, monetary policy influences commodity
storage, trade, and financial investments (Frankel 2006). Contract enforcement,
rule of law, and effective government administration create the conditions for
intermediaries to provide insurance and capital, thereby facilitating resource
allocation and risk assessment (Levine et al. 2000; Conning and Udry 2007).
Governments’ commitment to predefined trade principles allows private traders and
stockholders to operate and smooth prices by exploiting arbitrage possibilities.
Finally, social protection schemes could increase the resilience of households to
cope with price and income shocks. Although social protection schemes and access
to insurance markets have no direct impact on volatility, they reduce the negative
welfare impacts of volatility and thus the need to reduce volatility by other measures.
Figure 1.3 focuses on the causal linkages between policies, markets, and agents.
For greater clarity, the figure omits several feedback effects from volatility to the
economy that are nevertheless relevant. Volatility itself influences the behavior
of governments, producers, consumers, processors, and traders who might have
difficulties in coping with excessive volatility. This can, in turn, lead to further policy
misbehavior and misallocation of resources. Increased volatility may signal risks
and thereby serve as a disincentive to investors, reducing the generally positive price
1 Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview 15
In the subsequent chapters of this book, the problem of volatile food prices is
approached from different perspectives to provide a comprehensive treatment of
the subject at different geographical, political, and economic scales. This multilayer
approach implies some overlap of specific topics: The role of policies, for example,
is addressed in almost all chapters; likewise, the analysis of drivers and impacts of
food price volatility cannot always be clearly separated due to various bidirectional
linkages at different scales. Nevertheless, we choose to structure the book and
the discussion of its content in five parts, starting with this introductury chapter
as the first part. The second part focuses on the causes, drivers, and international
policy responses that moderate or accelerate volatility. The third part provides in-
depth analyses of specific market interlinkages between asset classes, commodities,
and spatially separated markets. The fourth part of this book elaborates on several
case studies analyzing the role of governments or supranational regional bodies to
manage price volatility. The final part sheds light on how households, traders, and
communities are affected by volatility and how they cope with price volatility and
price shocks from a microeconomic perspective.
The book combines policy-relevant and applied research questions with
advanced empirical and quantitative analysis methods. It differs from other relevant
editions, which have focused mainly on international agricultural commodity
markets (Piot-Lepetit and M’Barek 2011), or on theoretical and methodological
works with little empirical analysis (Munier 2012). The scope of this book goes
beyond a recent book by Chavas et al. (2014) by including microeconomic analysis,
case studies, and explicit policy analysis. The book approaches the topic from a
variety of ways, from on-the-ground field research to high-frequency time series
16 M. Kalkuhl et al.
analysis, and involves researchers who are close to political decision processes.
Finally, it provides policymakers and applied researchers not only with answers to
urgent questions related to food price volatility but also with tools and concepts to
analyze and mitigate volatility in related contexts.
policy approaches to deal with volatile prices before the 2007/2008 crisis and the
new proposals that emerged during and after the crisis. These measures focus on
improving the information base by employing new instruments to make trade more
reliable or market tools to hedge against international price shocks. Both physical
and virtual emergency reserves are considered as potentially effective measures to
prevent crises, but the technical and political aspects of implementing such reserves
remain challenging. In Chap. 7, using national crop calendars from major global
crop producers, Mekbib Haile, Matthias Kalkuhl, and Joachim von Braun construct
a global panel data set on acreage, yield, and production response to international
prices prevailing at the respective planting time. The empirical analysis confirmed
that globally, producers respond positively to own crop prices and negatively to
competing crop prices and price risk (volatility). Applying the empirical model
to the recent price and volatility developments revealed that the global supply
response to higher crop prices was substantially weakened by high fertilizer prices
and price risk. Hence, excessive volatility also has negative long-run consequences
for global production expansion, which in turn may contribute to high prices and
high vulnerability of the global food system to harvest shocks.
Chapter 8 by Antoine Bouët and David Laborde focuses on trade policy and,
more specific, export taxes in times of food crisis. Export restrictions are both
a response of exporting countries to high international food prices and a driver
of additional international price increases. The authors elaborate on the different
motives behind applying export taxes and analyze and assess their quantitative
role in the 2007/2008 food crisis. Although anticyclical trade policy is a rational
individual choice to insulate domestic prices from international prices, collective
action by different countries partly neutralizes this effect while leading to large
market distortions. As existing WTO rules and legislation are not capable of solving
this collective action failure, alternative mechanisms need to be implemented, e.g.,
on a plurilateral base or by introducing a Pigouvian tax that reflects the external
social costs of anticyclical trade policy.
grain stocks, monetary policy, speculation, and financial markets. A vector error
correction analysis was used to confirm that a multitude of factors, including
speculation (measured by Working’s speculation index), monetary policy, oil prices,
and global demand changes, are decisive for the wheat price formation. In Chap.
11, Carlos Martins-Filho and Maximo Torero develop a nonparametric model to
analyze the impact of volatility on international markets on relative food prices in
developing countries. They found that higher international wheat price volatility
is often associated with higher relative domestic bread prices and cereal prices,
while international maize price volatility affects relative meat prices in developing
countries. As the direct welfare impacts of volatility are difficult to measure, their
approach provides a useful alternative way to study the welfare impacts of excessive
volatility.
In Chap. 12, Matthias Kalkuhl combines comprehensive price transmission
analysis with data on poverty rates in countries to examine the exposure and
vulnerability of the global poor to international price spikes. The analysis relies on
an alternative grain prices index that consists of prices of the major domestic staples
and is therefore a relevant proxy for food expenditures of the poor. The consideration
of a large set of international reference prices, including prices of futures contracts
at major exchanges, allowed for the identification of the markets that are relevant
for price transmission in a specific country. Mapping transmission elasticities onto
poverty rates showed that a large share of the global poor lives in countries where
international market shocks have significant impacts on domestic food markets.
Chapter 13 by Francisco Ceballos, Manuel A. Hernandez, Nicholas Minot, and
Miguel Robles employed a multivariate GARCH to analyze the transmission of
price volatility from major international commodity markets to domestic food
products in 27 developing countries. The results indicate that African countries
exhibit on average higher domestic price volatility. Volatility transmission from
international to local markets is heterogeneous among commodities and countries.
Maize prices showed the highest volatility transmission to Africa, rice prices to
Asian country, and wheat prices to Latin America. The analysis suggest that not
only do prices adjust through spatially separated agricultural markets but also price
risks—i.e., the likelihood of experiencing strong future price changes—of local food
markets are affected by international markets.
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