Machine Learning Guided Outlook of Global Food Insecurity Consistent with Macroeconomic Forecasts

Motivated by the deterioration in global food security conditions, this paper develops a parsimonious machine learning model to derive a multi-year outlook of global severe food insecurity from macro-economic projections. The objective is to provide forecasts that are internally consistent with wide...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Andree, Bo Pieter Johannes
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C The World Bank 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: World Bank E-Library Archive - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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100 1 |a Andree, Bo Pieter Johannes 
245 0 0 |a Machine Learning Guided Outlook of Global Food Insecurity Consistent with Macroeconomic Forecasts  |h Elektronische Ressource  |c Bo Pieter Johannes Andree 
260 |a Washington, D.C  |b The World Bank  |c 2022 
300 |a 44 pages 
653 |a Pre-Pandemic Food Security 
653 |a Food Security Policy 
653 |a Economic Shocks 
653 |a Food Crises 
653 |a Machine Learning 
653 |a Health, Nutrition and Population 
653 |a Macro-Economic Projection 
653 |a Food Security 
653 |a Social Development 
653 |a Humanitarian Needs 
653 |a Vulnerability 
653 |a Food and Nutrition Policy 
653 |a Food Insecurity 
653 |a Agriculture 
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520 |a Motivated by the deterioration in global food security conditions, this paper develops a parsimonious machine learning model to derive a multi-year outlook of global severe food insecurity from macro-economic projections. The objective is to provide forecasts that are internally consistent with wider economic assessments, allowing both food security policies and economic development policies to be informed by a cohesive set of expectations. The model is validated on holdout data that explicitly test the ability to forecast new data from history and extrapolate beyond observed intervals. It is then applied to the World Economic Outlook database of April 2022 to project the severely food insecure population across all 144 World Bank lending countries. The analysis estimates that the global severely food insecure population may remain above 1 billion through 2027 unless large-scale interventions are made. The paper also explores counterfactual scenarios, first to investigate additional risks in a downside economic scenario, and second, to investigate whether restoring macroeconomic targets is sufficient to revert food insecurity back to pre-pandemic levels. The paper concludes that the proposed model provides a robust and low-cost approach to maintain reliable long-term projections and produce scenario analyses that can be revised systematically and interpreted within the context of available economic outlooks