Co-inventions, uncertainties and global food security

This paper examines the effects of international collaborative efforts on climate-friendly agricultural technologies on global food security. In particular, we use patent data on environmental technological innovations for OECD countries and global food prices from the period 1990 to 2016. Also, we investigate the impact of uncertainties in weather conditions in terms of rising global temperature created by climate change using data on global surface temperature from the Energy Information Administration and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We used both impulse response functions and variance error decomposition from a panel Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) model to examine both the response of global food prices to shocks on the concerned variables and the decomposition of error variance in global food prices. First, our results show that international collaborative efforts on climate-friendly agricultural technologies reduce global food prices while increasing global surface temperature increases food prices. Regarding the variance decomposition of global food prices, results show that surface temperature followed by international collaborations in climate-friendly innovations and other environment-related technologies are the main drivers of forecast error variance in global food prices. The food price variance share associated with greenhouse gas emissions is less when compared to that of technological innovations.