Food Security, Climate Change and Environmental Pollution in MENA Region: Evidence from Second Generation Panel Analysis

Document Type : Original Research

Authors
B. Saboori 1
S. M. Mahdavian 2
M. H. Tarazkar 3
1 Department of Natural Resource Economics, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman.
2 Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zabol, Zabol Islamic Republic of Iran.
3 Department of Agricultural Economics, School of Agriculture, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Islamic Republic of Iran.
10.22034/JAST.26.6.1195
Abstract
Food security is a critical issue in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region due to its population growth, as well as geographical and climatic conditions. From one point of view, most of the countries in the region benefit from an abundance of natural resources centered on fossil fuels. From another point of view, environmental issues, particularly emissions caused by production activities, and the pressures caused by climate variability, highlight the importance of food security. Hence, the effects of climate change, energy consumption, environmental pollution and other control variables on food security in the MENA region were explored from 1990 to 2019. According to the cross-section dependency, the second-generation panel CS-ARDL (Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributed Lag) estimator was employed. The empirical results indicate that energy consumption, crop production land, CO2 emissions, and precipitation have a significant positive effect on crop production index, as index of food security. Additionally, urbanization and mean temperature have detrimental effects. The findings from Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality tests indicated that crop land and precipitation have a unidirectional causal effect on food security, whereas energy consumption, CO2 emissions, urbanization, and mean temperature have a bidirectional causal relationship with food security. These findings imply that while maintaining the level of agricultural production and increasing it, the climate effects and environmental aspects of production should not be overlooked.

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Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology
Volume 26, Issue 6
November and December 2024
Pages 1195-1208