Impact of Agricultural Price Volatility on Food Security: Evidence from Philippine Commodity Data

This paper examines the relationship between agricultural price volatility and food security in the Philippines using data from three key commodities such as rice, milkfish (bangus), and sweet potato, all chosen due to their significance in a typical Filipino diet and household food expenditure. The paper employed both static and dynamic analysis of the relationships using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and vector error correction model (VECM), respectively. The results of the static analysis showed statistically significant relationships for rice (positive sign, favoring the optimistic view) and sweet potato (negative sign, consistent with the conventional view). This reflects the sweet potato’s vulnerability to price instability and thus posts an area for government intervention, in contrast to rice’s resilience and potential benefits to price movements. In the dynamic analysis, the results revealed a lagged long-run bidirectional relationship between price volatility and food security for both rice and milkfish, while for sweet potato, the bidirectional effects are only evident in the immediate term or short-run. This suggests that policy interventions may be smoothened over time for rice and milkfish production, while instantaneous or immediately effective policy interventions must be made in the case of sweet potato production.

Raymund G. Macanas is a Ph.D. in Economics student at the Ateneo de Manila University and an Assistant Professor at the UP Asian Institute of Tourism. His research interests include impact evaluations, development planning, tourism economics, modernizing government regulations, tourism data analytics, investment planning, and quality and productivity improvements in the public sector.

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