How do natural disasters affect agriculture exports?

Global agricultural trade helps to balance the supply and demand for food worldwide, stimulating economic growth and promoting political stability. However, agriculture's inherent vulnerability to extreme weather events and other natural disasters has a significant impact on the industry amplified by trade, which can threaten global food security. This study examines both the deaths and economic losses caused by natural disasters and identifies the mechanisms and effects of these disasters on international agricultural trade from 2002 to 2023. The results show that natural disasters cause a decline in the volume of agricultural exports from affected countries, which is much larger than that of other industries. Despite the high demand inelasticity of agricultural products, which typically leads to increased export prices when production declines, the value of exports still declined significantly over the study period, implying an average annual export loss of $6.21 billion and 39,359 jobs. Geological disasters primarily hinder agricultural exports by increasing transportation costs, climatic disasters by damaging production systems, and biological disasters by increasing storage and compliance costs. We show that disasters have a more devastating effect on agricultural production in less developed countries, diminishing global product competitiveness for those countries, reducing export prices and intensifying disaster impacts. We also show that countries with low disaster risk, which lack emergency response experience, incur up to $ 2.053 million in agricultural export losses due to disasters. In addition, political risks interact with natural disasters, thereby amplifying the negative impact of natural disasters on agricultural exports. In terms of product heterogeneity, we find the destructive impact of disasters on primary agricultural products extends through the supply chain to processed agricultural goods, affecting both their production and export. We show that disasters exert an even more extended influence on the agricultural system through secondary effects that are 2.83 times greater than the direct impacts. Our findings provide valuable insights that should motivate countries affected by disasters to establish disaster prevention and recovery mechanisms to help minimize agricultural trade losses and safeguard global food security.