Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Introduction
High food prices are a concern for all families, but are particularly difficult for the poor who
struggle to purchase enough food for their daily needs even when prices are low. For farming
families, food prices affect household income as well as expenditures, since they grow food
for sale as well as for their own consumption. Weather-related production variability is also a
source of income uncertainty for farmers, and when food prices are high and production fails,
these households will have particular difficulties obtaining enough food for three meals a day.
In this topic, the inter-relationships among food prices, food security and the variability of
food production due to climate and weather are examined.
The Earth observation data record from satellites is now three decades long, providing
robust, spatially explicit, high quality datasets that can be used to determine growing con-
ditions across continents. Droughts, floods or other extreme weather events that affect agri-
cultural yield and ultimately food production can be observed using satellite remote sensing
data. Remote sensing uses instruments mounted on satellites or in planes to produce images
or scenes of the Earth's surface, and is part of a suite of tools that provide up-to-date and
quantitative information about land conditions to decision makers. These datasets serve as the
basis for understanding trends and extremes of weather that impact the availability of food
over large areas. Climate variability can be quantified by satellite data and used to estimate the
likely impact on agricultural and economic systems.
Unusually or prohibitively high local food prices are a primary cause of food insecurity in
the world. Information on food prices can enable diagnosis of market functioning, weather-
related production shortfalls, and changes in accessibility of food across wide areas. These are
all warnings of food security problems that policy makers should respond to, but may not be
visible through other sources of information due to the complexity of the food system. Integ-
rating climate-related shocks into food price analysis should be a new source of information
for policy makers in their efforts to protect the most vulnerable from food security threats.
Climate variability is defined as seasonal, annual, interannual or several years-long varia-
tions in temperature and precipitation around an average condition defined over several
