Agricultural production can be negatively impacted not only by changing long-term climate conditions, but also by shorter-term extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods. Negative shocks to the food system due to the impacts of weather shocks on production may be mitigated by food storage, which can smooth consumption by saving food commodities from higher production periods for use in lower production periods. This smoothing occurs through stabilizing both availability–the quantity of food that is available–and affordability–as prices increase with lower availability, potentially impacting the ability of some consumers to afford their required food supply. Few studies have explored the effects of (1) interannual variability in crop yields on food consumption or (2) the role of food storage in mitigating these outcomes.

Here we utilize several recent developments in the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) to explore the effects of extreme weather events on crop yields and the value of food storage in mitigating those consequences on multi-sector outcomes, including food supply and consumption and water usage for irrigation. First, we model the impacts of a simulated drought using the newly incorporated “expectations-based” decision making, which separates the producer decision about what and how much to plant from the final crop yields. Second, we incorporate agricultural storage as a consumption and supply source, allowing us to analyze different levels of crop storage. In addition, we run these scenarios using a single-year time step, in order to better simulate annual and multi-year droughts and the consumption-smoothing effects of storage. We also utilize the ability to model multiple income groups, to explore of the distributional impacts of these changes. In addition to exploring the value of different levels of storage in mitigating the effects of drought, we will also simulate a real-world, historical drought, to test the GCAM outputs against historical outcomes, such as food supply/availability, consumption, food expenditures, and nutritional outcomes.

The results of this work will (1) offer insights into the role of food storage in improving the resilience of the global food system and (2) provide a means of model validation, through comparing results from GCAM simulations against similar historical events.