Is Climate Change a Driver of Food Price Inflation?

Food price inflation remains a hotly debated topic among pundits, policy makers, and academics around the world, with some commentators identifying rising grocery prices as a decisive factor in recent elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Argentina, and Pakistan (Horsley, 2024). In discussing potential drivers of food price inflation, many experts and writers in prominent media outlets—such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and PBS—have pointed to climate change as a culprit (Popovich, 2022; Kantchev and Chopping, 2023; Nawaz, 2022). Are these claims about the relationship between climate change and food prices justified? Crucially, the answer to this question depends on what type of climate change is under consideration—past changes versus the various potential future climate change scenarios. Figure 1 highlights the various impact pathways through which climate change may affect food prices. Figure 2 shows recent food inflation trends in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, while Figure 3 shows global temperature trends. We turn to the academic literature to investigate the potential magnitude associated with these relationships.