Monitoring global and national food price crises

• Published in: Food policy Vol. 49; pp. 84 - 94
• Main Authors: Cuesta, José, Htenas, Aira, Tiwari, Sailesh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.12.2014; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Agricultural and food market; Calibration; Crisis; Economic information; Food; Food insecurity; Food policy; Food prices; Food security; Food supply; Foods; Global; Inflation; Information systems; Monitoring; National; Policies; National; Food insecurity; Calibration; Food prices; Monitoring; Global; Crisis
• ISSN: 0306-9192; 1873-5657
• DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2014.06.001

[Display omitted] •There is not an internationally accepted definition of global food crises.•The paper develops a practical and integrated definition of food price crisis.•A framework is calibrated using historical food price data.•The framework identifies recent episodes of food price crises in 2008, 2011 and 2012.•The proposed framework does not incur in false positives. This paper develops, calibrates, and runs a new food price crisis monitoring framework. The proposed framework has an integrated approach to capture global and national vulnerabilities and offers an alternative to existing food insecurity information systems, which suffer from a lack of consensus on the definition of “food crisis.” The framework successfully identifies the recent episodes of food price crises in 2008, 2011, and 2012. This paper also recommends ways in which the framework could be refined to increase country coverage and provide better information on country-level food inflation.