Investigating the effect of climate change on food loss and food security in Bangladesh

Climate change and extreme climatic events cause massive food grain loss, which adversely impacts food availability, food import, and other economic factors. Bangladesh has been combating climate variability and extreme climatic events to abate agricultural production loss for a long time. In this article, we investigated the relationship between food grain loss and food security with reference to extreme climatic events in Bangladesh, based on data from 1984 to 2017. We used the vector auto-regression (VAR) model and derivative analyses, and suggested policy implications related to the existing national agricultural policy. Five time-series variables were judiciously considered: food availability, food loss, food import, gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, and inflation rate. The results show that the variable, food grain loss has a reverse association with food security—it escalates import from the world food market, causing import-dependence. Moreover, food loss significantly instigates inflation. However, the GDP growth rate was found to be a weak provocateur. Overall, climate change and climatic extremes jeopardize the country’s food security and hinder its pursuit of the sustainable development goals, especially stand-alone goals 1 and 2. Therefore, it is concluded that changes in climate and their correlations are detrimental to Bangladesh’s food security and economy.