The Food and Agriculture Sector in IMF Publications: A Text-Mining Analysis

This paper presents a text-mining analysis of discussions of food and agriculture issues in publications of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) from 1946 to mid-2025, with deeper analysis on subsets of this period for selected publication types. It examines how references to food security and agriculture (FSA) have evolved over time, assesses how they differ across IMF outlets and regional focus of the papers, and explores the coverage of subtopics of FSA as well as broader economic contexts within which FSA is contextualized. Using text data from the IMF’s eLibrary metadata as well as its full-text data processed through the use of the Fund Document Extraction Toolkit (FDET), the study identifies key trends in the frequency and intensity of FSA references. The results indicate that IMF attention to FSA issues tends to peak during periods of global food crises and significant agricultural policy changes. These peaks closely track inflationary trends with minimal lag, suggesting rapid response of IMF work to crises. The study also reveals regional variations, with Sub-Saharan Africa and Emerging and Developing Asia exhibiting the highest prevalence of FSA references, while advanced economies show lower prevalence. The analysis also finds that FSA-focused publications exhibit greater attention to selected core macroeconomic themes (inflation and trade) as well as to newer thematic areas (climate change and inequality) relative to other IMF work. The tools and methods can be applied to macrocritical dimensions of other sectoral concerns, and the findings provide a foundation for further research that can extend the methodology and content of this work.