Historic food production shocks: Quantifying the extremes

Abstract

Understanding global food production trends is vital for ensuring food security and to allow the world to develop appropriate policies to manage the food system. Over the past few years, there has been an increasing attention on the global food system, particularly after the extreme shocks seen in food prices after 2007. Several papers and working groups have explored the links between food production and various societal impacts however they often categorise production shocks in different ways even to the extent of identifying different levels, countries and timings for shocks. In this paper we present a simple method to quantify and categorise cereal production shocks at a country level. This method can be used as a baseline for other studies that examine the impact of these production shocks on the global food system.