A Hurricane Risk and Loss Assessment of Caribbean Agriculture

Hurricanes act as large external shocks potentially causing considerable damage to agricultural production in the Caribbean. While a number of existing studies have estimated their historic economic impact, arguably the wider community and policy makers are more concerned about their future risk and potential losses, since this type of information is useful for disaster preparedness and mitigation strategy and policy. This paper implements a new approach to undertake a quantitative risk and loss assessment of the agricultural sector of Caribbean island economies. To this end we construct an expected loss function that uses synthetically generated, as well as historical, hurricane tracks within a wind field model that takes cropland exposure derived from satellite data into consideration. The results indicate that expected losses are potentially large but vary considerably across the region, where the smaller islands are considerably more likely to be negatively impacted.