Roles of commodity futures derivatives and financial crises in global food security

Abstract Commodity futures have been largely blamed for the price hikes in 2007/mid-2008 and 2010/2011 and the decreased food security around the world, especially in less developed countries. There still exist serious disagreements between most economists and policymakers as to whether this is the case. We run time-series regressions for all samples and subsamples for lower-income, middle-income, and high-income countries respectively. The empirical results show that commodity futures have a more significant negative impact on food security in low-income countries than in middle-income and high-income economies. Financial crises, however, have a significant impact on food security in all the regional divisions as a whole and are seen to exasperate the negative effect of some of the commodity futures on food security. We also find evidence that a certain degree of speculation in some commodities stabilises prices of those commodities as expected by theory. Our results have important policy implications as policymakers must control these speculations but should also be careful not to overregulate the market.