Climate change, agricultural production and civil conflict: Evidence from the Philippines

Crost, Benjamin; Duquennois, Claire; Felter, Joseph H.; Rees, Daniel I.

doi:10.1016/j.jeem.2018.01.005

Cited by 74 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…However, I explore various lags in Figure A9. The temporal lag on rainfall is also consistent with the temporal lag found by Crost et al (2015) for the impact of rainfall on civil conflict when operating through agricultural production. …”

Section: Empirical Model and Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade

Boxell

2017

SSRN Journal

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Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on 19th century rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I show that negative rainfall shocks and long-run shifts in the mean level of rainfall increased the number of slaves exported from a given region and may have had a persistent impact on the level of development today. Using geocoded data on 19th century African conflicts, I show that these drought conditions also increased the likelihood of conflict, but only in the slave exporting regions of Africa. I also explore the role of household desperation, the internal African slave market, and disease outbreaks in explaining the negative relationship between droughts and slave exports. I find limited evidence for for these alternative mechanisms, with household desperation having the most empirical support. These results contribute to our understanding of the process of selection into the African slave trade.JEL Classification: N37, N57, O15, Q54

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Section: Empirical Model and Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade

Boxell

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…8 The outcome of interest for this study is the number of violent incidents, defined as incidents resulting in at least one casualty, in a given province and year. This outcome is a relatively low-noise measure of conflict intensity, and was previously used by Crost et al (2015) to study the effect of seasonal rainfall on conflict in the Philippines.…”

Section: Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…9 For these reports, military field operatives identified villages with insurgent activities and assigned them to three categories based on the level of influence insurgents wielded. 10 Data derived from intelligence assessments of this type have been used by Crost et al (2015) to study the effect of conditional cash transfers on insurgent influence in the Philippines.…”

Section: Data and Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For our measure of territorial control, we calculate the fraction of villages in a province that were reported to be in the highest category of insurgent influence. This category includes villages "characterized by a permanent rebel presence in the village, with rebels at times observed carrying arms openly and in some cases conducting military training among their members" (Crost et al, 2015). We believe that this measure is a good proxy for the NPA's local capacity, since only a locally dominant insurgent force will be able to carry arms and conduct training openly without interference by the armed forces.…”

Section: Data and Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Export Crops and Civil Conflict

Crost

Felter

2019

Journal of the European Economic Association

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Many experts see a move toward high-value export crops, such as fruits and vegetables, as an important opportunity for economic growth and poverty reduction, but little is known about the effects of export crops in fragile and conflict-affected countries. We exploit movements in world market prices combined with geographic variation in crop production to show that increases in the value of bananas, the country’s biggest export crop, caused an increase in conflict violence and insurgent-controlled territory in the Philippines. This effect was concentrated in provinces where bananas are produced in large plantations with areas greater than 25 hectares. Our results are consistent with a mechanism in which insurgents fund their operations by extorting large agricultural export firms.

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“…Farmers and consumers of agricultural goods in developing countries not only suffer from chronic poverty but they often experience income shortfalls and food price spikes due to droughts, pest outbreaks or crop diseases causing large scale agricultural failures. These agricultural shocks can lead to conflict and civil unrest when poverty and malnutrition become rampant (Couttenier and Soubeyran 2014, von Uexkull et al 2016, Crost et al 2018, Harari and La Ferrara 2018. Larger farms may operate under different economic constraints and can hedge differently against risk compared to smaller farms (Rosenzweig and Binswanger 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The contrasting effects of farm size on farm incomes and food production

Noack

Larsen

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Small-scale farming provides both food and livelihoods for the vast majority of the global poor. Thus, increasing and stabilizing farm incomes and food production in developing countries is fundamental to reducing global poverty. Policies for rural development such as improved access to non-agricultural incomes or land titling may benefit farmers, but they may also lead to farm consolidation with unintended consequences for aggregate food supply. Using a large panel dataset of rural households in Uganda, we parse apart how farm size affects the level and riskiness of agricultural incomes as well as of local food supply. Our findings indicate that while output per unit of land does decline with increasing farm size as suggested by previous literature, agricultural incomes increase with farm size. We show further that while the variance of agricultural incomes declines with increasing farm size, the variance of local food production increases with farm size. These results suggest that farmers benefit from larger farms, earning higher and more stable incomes while consumers suffer from lower and more volatile food supply.

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Climate change, agricultural production and civil conflict: Evidence from the Philippines

Cited by 74 publications

References 56 publications

Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade

Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade

Export Crops and Civil Conflict

The contrasting effects of farm size on farm incomes and food production

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