Monitoring global and national food price crises

This paper develops, calibrates, and runs a new food price crisis monitoring framework. The proposed framework has an integrated approach to capture global and national vulnerabilities and offers an alternative to existing food insecurity information systems, which suffer from a lack of consensus on the definition of “food crisis.” The framework successfully identifies the recent episodes of food price crises in 2008, 2011, and 2012. This paper also recommends ways in which the framework could be refined to increase country coverage and provide better information on country-level food inflation.