Development of Food Security Index Introducing Information on the Market Situations

抄録

The combination of global warming, economic development, increasing population, and so on gives rise to the uncertainty and risk in supply and demand of world grain market. As a result of that, the world has suffered increasing the price of grains in recent years. The world market structure of grain can be summarized as a few exporters and many importers. It is necessary to test if this structure is monopolistic or not. If the market is dominated by some exporters, food security will be fragile in the grain import countries. Not only self-sufficiency rate but also information on the market situations becomes important to assess food security. Food security can be understood by three concepts of availability, affordability and utilization. In this study, A new food security index is developed by considering information on the market situations-exporters' market power and importer loyalty in the concept of affordability which did not include in the previous study. Importer loyalty and market power are estimated by Markov process model and residual demand elasticity model, respectively. Interpreting the developed indices will be helpful for policy-maker to understand the national food security more precisely.