Food Security in SAARC and Climate Change

Abstract

The paper tries to examine the impact of climate change indicators (e.g., CO2 emissions, N2 O and CH4 emissions from land use, rice and cereals, temperature change and food inflation rate) on the variability of food supply in kilo calorie per capita per day in SAARC during 2000-2021 by applying panel regression and panel cointegration and vector error correction methods. The paper found that there is significant impact of emissions from land use, rice and cereals and emissions from CO2 respectively according to fixed effects model. The Pedroni, Kao and Johansen-Fisher panel cointegration among the variables assured long run association and there are significant short run causalities from food price inflation rate and from temperature change to variability of food supply respectively. The long run causality implies that the incremental variability of food supply is significantly positively related with incremental emissions from land use and incremental CO2 while significantly negatively related with emission from rice and cereals. It was found from VECM that the incremental variability of food supplyin kilo calorie per capita per day showed significant negative relation with incremental temperature change and significant positive relation with incremental food price inflation rate respectively.