Three Essays on Food Security: Sustainable Development, Structural Drivers and Agricultural Price Dynamics

Abstract

This dissertation constitutes of three essays that focus on the role of food (in)security in sustainable development, identifying structural drivers of food (in)security with the COVID-19 period and the determination of the factors influencing agricultural price changes by taking three distinct crises (Global Food Crisis (2008–2009), also called the global financial crisis; Russia–Türkiye aircraft crisis (2015–2016), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021)) into account. The first framework provides insight into the significant role of food security/insecurity in sustainable development. This chapter unbares the vicious circle between the food security and SDGs because a factor can serve as both a primary cause and a trigger or outcome, even some factors can act as both the cause and consequence of a determinant.Initiating action on these interconnected factors can trigger a butterfly effect within that vicious circle, potentially transforming it into a virtuous circle, ensuring the foundation for sustainable development.In the second study, we investigate to identify structural drivers of food (in)security with the COVID-19period, during which food (in)security emerged as a prominent global concern. The study was conducted on the 2004-2022 period and 138 countries and applied through System GMM model. Based on the six key factors (economic, governmental, agricultural, political, demographical and environmental) and one external shock (COVID-19 pandemic), we provide a general picture of the topic and yielded striking findings about food (in)security. The findings we obtained reveal the importance of the lagged value of the prevalence of undernourishment, inflation, food production, rural population, cereal import dependency and COVID-19 pandemic. Among them, the variables including the lagged value of PoU (prevalence of undernourishment), COVID-19 pandemic, food production, inflation and cereal import dependency from the most to the least influential have been determined as triggering and aggravating factors on the food insecurity. The rural population appears the only positive influence on food security in our analysis. Taking some measures and improvements grounded on better production, distribution, income level, infrastructure and policies may exhibit considerable potential on production growth, stronger national food systems and thus reducing the severity of food insecurity. The third focal point of our study is to examine the determinants of agricultural price fluctuations in Türkiye between 2002 and 2021, with particular attention to the impacts of three major crises (Global Food Crisis (2008–2009), also called the global financial crisis; Russia–Türkiye aircraft crisis (2015–2016), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021)) of different causes. To capture both short- and longterm dynamics, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is employed. The findings indicatethat, among the selected agricultural products and potential explanatory variables, the most influential drivers of price changes are government effectiveness, regulatory quality, nitrogen use, water pricing, money supply, exchange rate, and GDP, each within their respective categories.