Improving Existing Methods of IFSA Supply Forecasting

The International Food Security Assessment (IFSA) report provides forecasts for grain demand, production, and the implied additional grain supply requirement for 77 low- and middle-income countries. In this study, we attempt to enhance the IFSA model by improving the model to forecast production 1 and 10 years into the future. Our results indicate that forecasting growing area and yield separately performs the best when forecasting production rather than directly forecasting production. For predicting and forecasting growing areas, the best model specification includes country-specific linear trends, annual precipitation, futures price, and country-specific fixed effects. Similarly, the best model specification for predicting and forecasting yield involves country-specific linear trends, pooled coefficients on temperature, and country-specific fixed effects. When we compare our best model specification with previous methods used in the IFSA model to predict yield, our revised model outperforms the previous method.