Page 280 - Climate Change and Food Systems

climate change and food systems: global assessments and implications for food security and trade
rice. This partially explains the negative terms of trade effect for these importing regions as we consider the key contributors to welfare change.12 Figure 3 shows changes in welfare measured with equivalent variations (EV).
Rice-consuming developing countries
would become worse off, while rice- and sugar- producing developed countries would become better off. Among the welfare-losing regions, China, Indonesia, South Asia and Viet Nam are
the most negatively affected. The welfare results are shown in Figure 3 indicate that endowment effect accounts significantly for the projected welfare loss in these regions. Among the welfare- gaining regions –Australia & New Zealand (ANZ), Brazil, North America, Oceania, and Thailand – improvements in the terms of trade contribute most to the projected welfare change of these regions. Price rises of their major crop exports (rice for Thailand, wheat for Brazil, grains for ANZ and North America) specifically promote the welfare gains. Argentina and Mexico are also key exporters of wheat and grains, following North America, the European Union, and Russia. Since a 1-metre SLR may claim as much as 1.5 percent of agricultural land in Argentina and Mexico, the negative endowment effects appear likely to be quite substantial. Argentina and Mexico therefore give
12 In the GTAP model simulation, the concept of equivalent variations (EV) is adopted to measure change in welfare. Huff & Hertel (2000) proposed the breakdown of EV into the following seven categories of contributing effects:
(1) endowment effect: due to changes in availability of primary factors;
(2) technical efficiency effect: due to changes in the use efficiency of productive inputs;
(3) allocative efficiency effect: due to changes in allocation of resources, relative to pre-existing distortions;
(4) terms of trade effect: due to changes in export prices relative to import prices;
(5) capital price effect: due to changes in the relative prices of savings and investment;
(6) population effect: due to changes in population size; and
(7) distribution effect: due to changes in preference for the distribution of regional income between private consumption, government consumption and savings.
way to the other wheat and grain exporters, e.g., Brazil, the European Union, and North America.
5. Conclusions
Understanding of past sea-level changes has been greatly improved since the IPCC AR4. In
the IPCC AR5, under high unmitigated emission levels (RCP8.5), climate change is expected to raise global sea level between a half metre and one metre by the end of this century; the report has a high level of confidence that the rate of SLR is accelerating. In this study, we have modelled the potential effects of SLR with an approach
that recognizes agro-ecological dissimilarities
in land characteristics for agricultural purposes in a multiregional, multisectoral CGE model. The implications for agricultural production and trade diversion impact are also investigated.
By considering crop suitability of land and region-differentiated agricultural extent loss, the framework of our economy-wide impact study is designed to provide a new perspective for the global concern regarding SLR and its socio- economic consequences.
Our study provides an integrated economic assessment on rice in the global and regional context. Among Asian countries, Viet Nam is likely to be hit hardest, in terms of agricultural extent loss to SLR, because its cultivating zones of paddy rice, such as the Mekong Delta, are prone to inundation once the sea level rises. This will affect countries near and far that depend on Vietnamese rice exports, including Caribbean and Central America, Malaysia, the Near East, North Africa, Singapore, and the Philippines. Fortunately, Thai rice would be able to partially supplement the shortfall caused by the decline of Vietnamese rice exports. The wheat sector would also be adversely affected, though not directly, in the South Asian countries and China, where wheat is the second major staple crop. The Asian rice sector would draw more land away from wheat and other crop sectors due to land competition from a steadfast demand for
the staple rice crop. Wheat- and grain-growing
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