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The effect of El Niño Southern Oscillation on U.S. corn production and downside risk

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Abstract

ENSO teleconnections imply anomalous weather conditions, causing yield shortages, price fluctuations, and civil unrest. We estimate ENSO’s effect on U.S. county-level corn yield distributions and find that temperature and precipitation alone are not sufficient to summarize the effect of global climate on agriculture. We find that acreage-weighted aggregate impacts mask considerable spatial heterogeneity at the county-level for the mean, variance, and downside risk of corn yields. Impacts for mean yields range from − 24 to 33 % for El Niño and − 25 to 36 % for La Niña, with the geographical center of losses shifting from the Eastern to Western corn belt. ENSO’s effect on the variance of crop yields is highly localized and is not representative of a variance-preserving shift. We also find that downside risk impacts are large and spatially correlated across counties.

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Notes

  1. The literature on this topic is still evolving, with some studies questioning whether the observed change in ENSO activities during the past several decades is statically significant (Rajagopalan et al. 1997). The general conclusion being that none of the competing hypotheses can be rejected at this time (Fedorov and Philander 2000).

  2. A strength of our empirical approach is that we estimate the entire distribution of yields. As such, one can calculate a large variety of risk measures including variance, coefficient of variation, upside and/or downside risk, partial moments, Value at Risk, etc. We focus on downside risk because of its established role in production decision-making.

  3. While these tests provide evidence that the included dummy variable effects are non-zero, it is possible that subsets of the estimates are statistically indistinguishable from one another. This could arise if the regional signatures of ENSO have spatial scales broader then a few counties. Determining the appropriate clusters of homogeneous signatures would require a thorough statistical analysis, as such it is left for future research to consider.

  4. It should be noted that there is unresolved debate regarding the causal linkage between food prices and civil unrest (e.g. Bazzi and Blattman 2011).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michael Roberts and Wolfram Schlenker for providing the temperature and precipitation data, as well as Marc Bellemare and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, Mississippi State University, Starville, MS, 39762, USA

    Jesse B. Tack

  2. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    David Ubilava

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  1. Jesse B. Tack
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  2. David Ubilava
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Correspondence to Jesse B. Tack.

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Tack, J.B., Ubilava, D. The effect of El Niño Southern Oscillation on U.S. corn production and downside risk. Climatic Change 121, 689–700 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0918-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0918-x

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