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The Largest Crop Production Shocks: Magnitude, Causes and Frequency

The Largest Crop Production Shocks: Magnitude, Causes and Frequency

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Authors

Florian Ulrich Jehn, James Mulhall, Simon Blouin, Łukasz G. Gajewski, Nico Wunderling

Abstract

Food is the foundation of our society. We often take it for granted, but stocks are rarely available for longer than a year, and food production can be disrupted by catastrophic events, both locally and globally. To highlight such major risks to the food system, we analyzed FAO crop production data from 1961 to 2023 to find the largest crop production shock for every country and identify its causes. We show that large crop production shocks regularly happen in all countries. This is most often driven by climate (especially droughts), but disruptions by other causes like economic disruptions, environmental hazards (especially storms) and conflict also occur regularly. The global mean of largest country-level shocks averaged -29%, with African countries experiencing the most extreme collapses (-80% in Botswana), while Asian and Central European nations faced more moderate largest shocks (-5 to -15%). While global shocks above 5% are rare (occurring once in 63 years), continent-level shocks of this magnitude happen every 1.8 years on average. These results show that large disruptions to our food system frequently happen on a local to regional scale and can plausibly happen on a global scale as well. We therefore argue that more preparation and planning are needed to avoid such global disruptions to food production.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X55B25

Subjects

Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Risk Analysis

Keywords

food security, Global Catastrophic Food Failure, global catastrophic risk, Food Shock, crop production, History

Dates

Published: 2025-09-04 07:45

Last Updated: 2025-09-04 15:48

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License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International