Potential Impact of Climate Change on Food Consumption Through Price Channel: Case for Turkey

Like many MENA countries, the factors leading to climate change in Turkey have drastically escalated in the last two decades. This paper mainly focuses on the issue of ensuring food security. We aim to examine the significance of climate shocks in Turkey's food prices. The unique structures of this paper are threefold: First, we define climate shocks as persistent deviations from the long-term mean in a region regarding temperature and precipitation due to climate change; second, controlling for possible shocks, we examine the role of climate change in food price processes; and third, we examine the causal effect of food price on per capita food expenditure based on the demand equation. We find the most prominent climate change effect on prices of bread and cereals, and other food products. The estimates of the second phase of the analysis suggest that both price and the wealth effects on food consumption increase more in regions where climate change exists than in regions with no significant change in climate figures. However, we do not observe significant differences in the wealth effect on non-food consumption among the regions.