Essays on food security

My three dissertation essays explore food security questions in Ethiopia, Philippines and India. Specifically, I estimate how food security responds to (1) land degradation in Ethiopian highlands, (2) domestic marketing policies in Philippines, and (3) trade protection policies in India. In my first paper, I merge environmental maps with geographically coded farmer survey data in Ethiopian highlands to estimate the effect of land degradation on the value of agricultural production. Because land degradation may be endogenous to agricultural production choices, this analysis explicitly controls for endogeneity using bequests and type of energy used for cooking as instrumental variables. I find that land degradation reduces agricultural value by 4 percent, which is smaller than when endogeneity is not accounted for. I also generate a differential impacts map based on the estimates from the spatial weighted regression. By identifying those regions or sectors of Ethiopia most at risk of losing agricultural value from land degradation, this paper provides important information for targeting conservation measures. My second paper examines the effect of government grain procurement and distribution in the Philippines. I use a structural Vector Autoregression model to estimate impacts of policy shocks on market prices and then use the estimates simulate ‘no policy’ prices. I compare the simulated ‘no policy’ prices with actual historical prices. I find that government activities have a very small impact on rice price levels and variability. Specifically, I find that the government’s activities only impacted food prices during the small number of years when the country was self-sufficient in production. Finally, in my third paper, I examine how trade policies, specifically export bans, affected domestic rice and wheat market integration in India. I verify that Indian markets maintain segmented equilibria by testing for and finding thresholds in a Threshold Vector Error Correction Model. More specifically I find that export bans may have had have had unintended consequences of increasing domestic price differences thereby resulting in the lack of domestic market integration. Since the decisions to use these blunt instruments are taken by domestic governments worldwide, studying the domestic effect of these policies has the potential to affect the use of these policies by other countries in the future.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural & Applied Econ

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Jolejole-Foreman, Maria Christina

Contributors dc:contributor

• Baylis, Katherine R.
• Mallory, Mindy L.
• Garcia, Philip
• Winter-Nelson, Alex E.
• Lipper, Leslie

• Food security
• Land degradation
• Instrumental Variable
• Food prices
• Market integration
• Vector Autoregression
• Vector Error Correction

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Maria Christina Jolejole-Foreman

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50337

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50337