Risk Assessment of Food Supply: A Computable General Equilibrium Approach

In recent years, food prices have been volatile worldwide. High and fluctuating food prices have led to riots in many low income countries, and have increased the world poverty population. Both developed and developing nations are rushing to buy farmland, even outside their own countries, for their future food security, which indicates that it has been more difficult to secure food supplies. This book addresses the issue of agricultural trade liberalisation by Japan, factors behind the world food price spikes in 2008 and their impacts on the least developed economies, using computable general equilibrium models. The book gives the reader insights into the probabilistic benefits and risks of agricultural free trade by Japan that past literature has not answered. Furthermore, the reader will be given a better understanding about the size of the impacts of various factors behind the 2008 food price hikes, such as biofuel, the rise in oil price, severe poor harvests in Australia, and their effects on impoverished countries. This book will be indispensable, not only for students, academics and policy makers who are involved in the fields of agriculture, development, and food security, but also for people learning CGE modelling, as it provides readers with plenty of information on the structure and applications of the models.
About the Author: Tetsuji Tanaka is a Research Fellow at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen. He is also an author of the fifth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His principal research interest lies in computable general equilibrium analysis of issues in food security and climate change. He holds a PhD in Finance and Management from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Nobuhiro Hosoe earned a PhD in Economics at Osaka University and has been an Associate Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo since 1999. He is specialized in computable general equilibrium models and other simulation models for empirical analysis of trade policy and regulatory reforms in public utilities. Huanguang Qiu is Associate Professor at the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy (CCAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also Newton Fellow at the University of London and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Free University of Amsterdam. His major research fields include rural and regional agricultural development, agricultural trade, biotechnology policy, and general equilibrium model analysis. He has published more than 80 papers in international and Chinese peer reviewed academic journals. He received a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005.