Moderated by Lilyan Fulginiti, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Global agricultural productivity under climate change and implications for food security (Paper 1)

Presentation by Madhur Gautam, World Bank

The World is off course to meet the targets for SDG2.  Food insecurity has been on the rise since 2016, with acute food insecurity at its highest level since 2016, when formal monitoring started.  COVID-19 and the more recent shocks to global food markets caused by the war in Ukraine have brought food insecurity, and particularly the prospects of large-scale famines, to the top of the global policy and development agendas, climate change is one of the key drivers of the emerging longer-term crisis in food insecurity, along with conflict and recurring economic shocks.  This presentation will discuss some implications of the climate-productivity-food security nexus on global policy and development strategic priorities. 

Policies and Productivity in Argentinian Agriculture: A Long-Term Perspective (Paper 2)

Presentation by Stephen Morgan, USDA Economic Research Service

Authors: Stephen Morgan, USDA-Economic Research Service, Eugenia Saini, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA-FONTAGRO) and Keith Fuglie, USDA-Economic Research Service

Argentina has a competitive agricultural sector that has consistently provided significant surpluses of crop and livestock commodities for export. However, both over time and across commodities, agriculture’s growth performance has been uneven. This paper presents long-term indexes of output and total factor productivity for Argentine agriculture covering the period from 1914 to 2020. For 1961 to 2020, the paper develops separate total factor productivity indices for the crop and beef sectors and examines technological and policy drivers of TFP growth in these sectors. Since the 1930s, productivity improvement rather than resource expansion has been the primary driver of growth in the country’s agriculture. Since the 1960s, crop output and productivity have grown much more rapidly than productivity in the cattle sector. The effect of agricultural and trade policies, which have generally reduced the country’s agricultural terms of trade, on long-term productivity performance is also explored.

Unravelling the effects of weather and climate induced shocks on farm labor wages in the United States (Paper 3)

Presentation by Eric Njuki, Research Agricultural Economist, USDA Economic Research Service

This study evaluates the channels through which changing patterns in weather and climate are transmitted to hired farm workers’ wages. The central argument is that changing patterns in weather and climate negatively impact agricultural output and yields, altering the marginal product of labor, and subsequently farm workers’ wages. The extent of these reductions is an empirical question that we seek to establish. By exploiting variations in nonlinear measures of temperature and precipitation—growing degree days, harmful degree days, and precipitation— distinct channels through which workers’ wages are impacted are identified. Findings indicate that the net effect of a one standard deviation change in growing degree days, harmful degree days, and excess precipitation is a 7 percent decline in hourly wages for the average worker.