Working Paper No. 31 of 2019 on Climate Change, Agricultural Production, Trade, Food Security and Welfare in East African Community

Abstract

The East African Region is already experiencing increased climate change impacts including extreme weather conditions, persistent drought, floods, and landslides and rising sea level which threaten food security and efforts to eradicate poverty. The dependence on rain-fed agriculture in the region implies that agricultural production will continue to be highly vulnerable to climatic variability and climate change, mainly in form of shifts and changes in rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures leading to adverse impacts to social, physical, ecological and economic systems. The food security situation is further exacerbated by mounting restrictions on cross-border trade on agricultural products in the EAC region. This report specifically reviews the policies on climate change, agriculture production and trade; explores the spatial effects of climate change on agricultural production; assess the welfare implications of regional agricultural and trade policies and identifies the potential effects of climate change on food security in the region. The report adopts four models that integrate climate change, food production and security, trade and welfare implications. In the first step, simulations of future climate conditions (temperature, rainfall) from Global Climate Models (GCMs) are spatially downscaled and fed into a crop simulation model which assesses the changes in yields for maize in different agro-ecological zones in the EAC region. Output from the crop simulation model were then fed into the spatial equilibrium model (SEM) that was used to estimate the impacts of agriculture and trade policies on household welfare in the region. Finally, welfare implications are derived from analysis of resulting impacts across various food poverty lines. Projections were carried out for mid-century (2045).