How the Black Swan damages the harvest: statistical modelling of extreme events in weather and crop production in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Climate change constitutes a rising challenge to the agricultural base of developing countries. Most of the literature has focused on the impact of changes in the means of weather variables on mean changes in production and has found very little impact of weather upon agricultural production. Instead, a more recent stream of literature showed that we can assess the impact of weather on production by looking at extreme weather events. Based on this evidence, we surmise that there is a missing link in the literature consisting of relating the extreme events in weather with extreme losses in crop production. Indeed, extreme events are of the greatest interest for scholars and policy makers only when they carry extraordinary negative effects. We build on this idea and for the first time, we adapt a conditional dependence model for multivariate extreme values to understand the impact of extreme weather on agricultural production. Specifically, we look at the probability that an extreme event drastically reduces the harvest of any of the major crops. This analysis, which is run on data for six different crops and four different weather variables in a vast array of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, shows that extremes in weather and yield losses of major staples are associated events.