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 For instance, the 2008 drought in Middle Eastern and Central
Asian countries led to a 22% decrease in wheat production in
that area compared to the year prior. As a result, the value of
wheat imports increased by 224% compared to 2007, with most
imports coming from the U.S., Canada, Russia, and Ukraine.
The U of I research team conducted a statistical analysis (known
as a meta-analysis) of academic studies investigating the
relationships between weather and trade of agricultural and food
commodities. Their motivation was to find out which weather
characteristics matter most for exports versus imports.
“Our main finding is that the key driver of trade, whether at
the domestic or international level, is temperature in the place
of origin. An increase in temperatures negatively affects a
country’s ability to export agricultural goods, because it
reduces yield and decreases agricultural labor productivity,”
explains study co-author Sandy Dall’erba, professor in the
Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) and
co-director of the Center for Climate, Regional, Environmental
and Trade Economics (CREATE) at the U of I.
Temperature increases in the place of destination should lead to
more imports but the effect is not statistically significant,
Dall’erba notes. The role of precipitation, on the other hand,
turns out to be more fuzzy both in the place of origin and of
destination.
“Trade is one of the key tools with which to mitigate and adapt
to the effects of climate change, particularly in agriculture.
If a country is affected by adverse growing conditions, such as
drought, the ability to rely on foreign sources for food and
agricultural products is a key element of the ability to buffer
those sorts of shocks,” says William Ridley, assistant professor
in ACE, co-director of CREATE, and corresponding author on the
paper.
The researchers identified all academic studies on the topic,
which together cover a total of 235 individual estimates of the
relationship between weather and agricultural trade. Some
studies looked at multiple commodities and multiple countries
while others focused on specific regions like the Middle East
and North Africa (MENA); trade between the Philippines and the
rest of the world; or domestic trade, including a study by
Dall’erba that focuses on interstate flows of crops, fruits, and
vegetables in the United States.
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“The results of the original studies vary due to
study area, the methodology, and the quality of the data. Yet, they
all seem to agree about a clear negative impact of temperature on
the export of commodities. This effect is particularly acute in
developing countries as they have less capacity to adapt through
irrigation,” adds lead author Tauã Magalhães Vital, Universidade
Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, who started the work as a visiting
scholar at ACE in 2018.
Dall’erba notes, “Trade of agricultural commodities
is driven by differences in specialization and natural resources
between origin and destination places. Human beings have a taste for
variety when it comes to food so agricultural goods are quite
certainly the first commodities that were ever traded. However, over
the most recent years, we have seen several disruptions in the
global food supply chain such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
“Climate change and the increase in extreme weather events that
comes with it is a more serious, longer lasting, and more widespread
threat as it has the capacity to affect the natural resources in the
places of production and to abruptly decrease yield all the while
the world population – hence demand for food – keeps growing,” he
adds. “As a result, it is important to understand the role of
weather and climate on trade, to forecast their impact, and to
assess how resilient the food supply chain is.”
The paper, “What do the 235 estimates from the literature tell us
about the impact of weather on agricultural and food trade flows?”
is published in Global Food Security [https://doi.org/10.1016/
j.gfs.2022.100654 ]. Authors are Tauã Magalhães Vital, Sandy
Dall’erba, William Ridley, and Xianning Wang.
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Dudley Smith
Initiative in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and
Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign. This work was funded in part by the Hatch grant
program of USDA.
[Sources: William Ridley and Sandy
Dall’erba
News writer: Marianne Stein]
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