Implications of Climatic and Non-climatic Variables on Food Security in Developing Economies: A Conceptual Review

Numerous of studies estimate the influence of climatic factors on food-grain crops as a proxy for integrated food security in different regions of India, conclude that climate change has a significant and negative impact on food security in India [13]. Few studies used agricultural productivity of food-grain and commercial crops to assess the climatic change impact on agricultural productivity using district-wise and state-wise panel data in India [2,4-7]. These studies also predicted that climate change would bring serious threat for food security especially for developing countries [1-3,8]. Since, food security is not a function of foodgrain crops only and some other socio-economic and government policy factors also may affect the food security. Therefore, study based on food-grain crops may be unable to identify the actual situation of food security. Earlier studies did not empirically measure the influence of climatic factors on overall food security. Overall food security covers all the components of food security that is consider as food security index (FSI) [5,9-11]. FSI is an integrated index that includes a wide range of factors which are significantly associated with food security [5,9-11]. Furthermore, there is debate ongoing among the researchers in different field of studies (e.g., economics, sociology, health and biological sciences), national policy makers, development thinkers, international development organization and global policy maker that what must be proper solution to estimate the influence of climatic indicators, socio-economic variables, government policy factors and geographical factors on overall food security at individual level to households level, and country level to global level [9-12]. But anyone could not develop a concrete and rational scientific method to solve aforementioned problem. The question, therefore, to estimate the influence of climatic parameters and geographical location on FSI is still a greater challenge for existing researchers. For above-mentioned perspectives, few studies argued that scientific research communities need to develop an appropriate econometric model which would be useful to investigate the complex association of climatic factors with FSI. To account aforesaid drawback of earlier studies, the present study attempts to answer the following research questions: