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Food security is at risk from climate change. In fact, climate change and its drivers already affect food production through increased temperatures, changed precipitation patterns, extreme event frequency, and escalated carbon dioxide (CO₂) and ozone. These effects are expected to continue for the foreseeable future. This will cause changes to agricultural production worldwide with regional consequences for global food security. In the face of this, adaptations must be pursued that help agriculture maintain and enhance productivity under climate change while meeting growing demands for food. This chapter reviews the current literature on the impacts of climate change on agriculture and possible adaptation strategies to combat its effects. Specifically, this chapter focuses on research conducted on crop systems, livestock, fisheries, and food access.

This study concluded that food production systems around the world will be altered unevenly by climate change, with some gaining and many losing. Possible adaptation strategies will be suggested and successful implementation will need to include both public and private actions.

Given the inevitability of climate change impacting agricultural systems, adapting to the impacts is necessary to maintain future food security. More research is encouraged to determine how to best incorporate multiple systems, actors, and interests in adaptation, as well as how to best respond to the imminent threat to the food system.

This study aims to explore Taiwan's potential for bioenergy production using feedstocks grown on set-aside land and discusses the consequent effects on Taiwan's energy security plus benefits and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission.

The Modified Taiwan Agricultural Sector Model (Modified TASM), based on price endogenous mathematical programming, was used to simulate different agricultural policies related to bioenergy production. To do this simulation, the TASM model was extended to include additional bioenergy production possibilities and GHG accounting.

Taiwan's bioenergy production portfolio depends on prices of ethanol, electricity and GHG. When GHG prices go up, ethanol production decreases and electricity production increases because of the relatively stronger GHG offset power of biopower.

Taiwan is interested in producing bioenergy but only limited information is available. This study provides the information on potential bioethanol and bioelectricity production from various energy crops, GHG emission offset from bioenergy, and regional energy security.

Recently, USDA-RMA introduced a Trend Adjusted-Actual Production History (TA-APH) program, which increases APH by a trend factor to cover yield changes over time. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the TA-APH program on farmer participation, coverage election, and risk by analyzing data before and after the program.

Since the program was carried out in selected counties, the authors employ a difference in differences approach doing comparisons of insurance participation and coverage levels between eligible and ineligible counties.

The authors find that farmers within the counties where the TA-APH program was available experienced an increase in insured acres of 3 percent for corn and 5 percent for soybeans. The authors also find the farmers eligible for the program purchased lower coverage levels relative to those not eligible. However, the magnitude of that negative effect is relatively small, −0.9 percent in corn and −1.3 percent in soybeans. Collectively the evidence shows the TA-APH program does increase the guaranteed yield level mitigating farmer risk.

The data set used only permitted analysis at the county level, thus the authors could not look at the individual farmer choices.

The results suggest that if a greater level of farmer risk protection is desired from crop insurance, the authors find that the trend adjustment as implemented was a successful way to achieve this.

This paper contributes to the literature on the crop insurance by evaluating the program controlling for a non-participating groups, farming experience, liability rates, and subsidy rates. In doing this, it fulfills an identified need to study the actual impact on participation rates and coverage levels elected.

Crop yield variability is a defining characteristic of agriculture. Variations in yield and production are strongly influenced by fluctuations in weather. Concern has been expressed about the consequences of the buildup of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere on long-term climate patterns, including the frequency of extreme events, and the subsequent effect on crop yields and yield variability. In this chapter we present background on the variability issue, including a review of the physical and human dimensions of climate change as related to agricultural production. We also present the results of two recent studies; the first focuses on the effects of climatic variability on yields and the second on the effects of increases in extreme weather events on agriculture. The first study shows that temperature and precipitation changes affect both the mean and variances of crop yields, usually in opposite ways, e.g. under increasing temperatures, corn yields decrease and yield variance increases, while increases in precipitation increase corn yields and reduce variability. In the second study, increases in the frequency and strength of one type of extreme event, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO, results in economica damages to agriculture. These damages can be averted by using forecasts of such events in agricultural planting decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop information on the relative efficiency of Farm Credit System (FCS) lenders. Also the evolution of relative efficiency is examined as influenced by the biofuel boom, the financial crisis, and farm income increases. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A stochastic frontier production function is used to estimate technical efficiency of FCS banks and associations.

A significant difference is found in efficiency between large and small associations and banks. Larger asset bases and management compensation are found to be positively associated with efficiency. Banks are found to have higher technical efficiency than associations (66-46 percent). Association efficiency is found to be increasing indicating likely effects of recent consolidation. The financial crisis was not found to have a significant effect with the bioenergy and farm income booms being likely countervailing forces.

Further work is needed on the impact of the biofuel boom, increases in farm income, and new regulations.

The study provides information and indications of strategies for FCS management including additional consolidation.

This does an updated assessment of FCS efficiency taking into account changes in consolidation, lending practices, and economic conditions. Implications are developed for management actions such as more consolidation. The study also uses a more advanced methodology compared to older studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the grain production implications of alternative designs for China’s grain subsidy policy. In particular, the authors examine three subsidy designs including area-based subsidy, quantity-based subsidy and production-cost-based subsidy.

To carry out the analysis, the authors develop a Chinese agricultural sector model (CASM) and an econometric, policy action–farmer response summary model. The CASM is used under a wide variety of subsidy level and basis experiments to generate pseudo data on farmer reactions to subsidies. Then a summary function model was estimated over those pseudo data that quantitatively summarized modeled farmer responses to different grain subsidy schemes. In turn, the summary functions were used to optimize the subsidy level such that it maximized grain production both within and across the area-based, quantity-based and cost-based subsidies. Regional implications were also developed.

The authors found that the production-quantity-based subsidy is the most cost-effective in stimulating grain production among the subsidy schemes. The authors also argue that scheme complies with WTO regulations regarding product-specific support. The authors found that the areas where grain production was most affected were the traditional grain-producing regions.

To the authors’ knowledge the authors have not seen a study of the Chinese grain subsidy program context that examined the effects of alternative subsidy schemes, nor one that developed estimates of the optimal subsidy level. In addition, the methodology is unique employing bottom-up, regionally disaggregated, sector modeling coupled with an aggregate pseudo data based summary function approach providing a new, original approach for analyzing agricultural policy design.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of the positive impact of the FCS lending on farm incomes which should be useful to policymakers as they consider reforms and further support for this 100-year-old major agricultural lender.

The authors construct a panel for the 1991-2010 period from the FCS financial statements and evaluate how lending by the FCS institutions has affected farm incomes and farm output. The authors use fixed effects estimations and control for credit by other agricultural lenders as well as the stock of capital, prices, and interest rates. Since previous work suggests that rural financial markets are segmented and the FCS serves larger full-time farmers with mostly real-estate backed loans, the authors evaluate the impacts of farm real-estate backed loans and of short-term agricultural loans separately for a shorter period for which the data is available. The authors also perform robustness checks with alternative estimation techniques.

The authors found a positive association between credit by the FCS institutions and farm income and output. The magnitude of the estimated impact is larger during the 1990s than in the 2000s.

The positive link between the FCS institutions’ credit and farm incomes and output supports the notion that the FCS lending was beneficial to farmers. The evidence also supports the segmentation hypothesis of rural financial markets. The financial reports data for 1991-2010 are from the ACAs and FLCAs aggregated on the regional level because there is no clear way to classify FCS lending to a more disaggregate level like the state. The authors also assemble and analyze a state-level data set that contains state-level balance sheet data for the period 1991-2003.

The authors are not aware of another work that directly links (real estate and non-real estate) credit by FCS institutions to agricultural output and farm incomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficiency of the banking business of Japan’s agricultural cooperatives (JAs), which depend heavily on financial business with non-farmers, contradictory to cooperative principles.

The authors construct a panel data set over 2005–2016 from the financial statements of JAs’ prefectural-level federations and use the input distance stochastic frontier model with a time-variant inefficiency effect for analysis. Both the flow and stock measures of the banking output are used in identical models and the efficiency results are compared. The authors also investigate the determinants of efficiency by using the Tobit and ordinary least squares regression models.

There is strong evidence of significant prefectural differences in efficiency values. The ratio of lending to non-members to total loans is positively related to efficiency. In contrast, the higher reliance on a central organization and credit business leads to lower efficiency.

Apart from banking, JAs provide mutual insurance business services. As the authors investigate only the efficiency of JAs’ banking business in this study, it would be necessary to investigate the efficiency of their insurance business as well when evaluating JAs’ overall financial business.

There are few studies that investigate the efficiency of JAs’ banking business and its determinants, although significant attention has been paid to their excessive dependence on the financial business.