FOOD SECURITY, FOOD PRICES AND CLIMATE VARIABILITY - Food Security, Food Prices and Climate Variability - page 4

• Canweusesatelliteobservationstorelatethebiophysicalresponseofplantsdueto
climate variability to yield and overall food production?
• Dolocalfoodpricesrespondtoagriculturallyrelevantweathershocksinfoodinsecure
regions?
• Cannutritionoutcomesbelinkedtoclimatevariabilityandfoodpricevolatilityusing
data and analysis?
• Whatmonitoring,analysisandpolicychangesareneededintheglobalhumanitarian
system to respond to the links between climate, weather and food prices in food insecure
countries?
Geographic focus
Although the focus of the topic is on global issues of food security, many examples and data-
sets are from Africa. Africa has the most widely documented severe food security problems,
and has captured the focus of the international community. When drought occurs and food
production suffers, local food markets in Africa are poorly supplied and the impact of these
events can be seen in the food price time series. Because as a region, it has many governmental
and non-governmental organizations working on alleviating food security problems, there is
a lot of effort put into gathering and posting in publicly accessible databases food price
information. Famine early warning systems are one of the primary actors in food security
assessment and contribute to this work through the gathering and distribution of food price
information in Africa.
Early warning of food security crises involves a chain of information communication
systems that link observations of the determinants of food security to decision makers and
then actors who can respond to those crises. The US Agency for International Development's
(USAID) Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the United Nations Global
Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) and other local, regional and national early
warning systems work to provide timely and actionable information on food security crises to
those whose responsibility it is to respond. These organizations routinely collect food prices
and information on agriculturally relevant weather conditions, and assess the food security
situation in affected communities. But they lack the analytical framework to link the informa-
tion together in a quantitative way, since the links between weather and food prices can be
obscure (Barrett and Maxwell, 2005; Brown, 2008a).
Plate 1 shows the extent of the global food price information currently available from the
United Nations and USAID. Note that many of the time series, particularly outside capital
cities, are in Africa. These datasets are gathered and distributed to improve response to food
security crises, and thus are more comprehensive in regions where emergency food aid is
more likely to be distributed. Regions with comprehensive, effective, government-led food
price stabilization policies, such as India, Pakistan and China, are in general excluded from
this topic. Because the focus is the interaction between food prices, food security and climate
variability, if food prices are artificially controlled, then different analytical methods from
those presented here must be used to study the effect of production variability on household
income and security.
Early warning organizations are a target for the research, approaches and analysis provided
in this topic. The author has worked with FEWS NET and has studied its methods and data
for the past decade, and thus many of the examples and datasets used here are derived from