Climate change, rice crops, and violence

Abstract

This article contributes to the literature on the nexus between climate change and violence by focusing on Indonesia over the period 1993–2003. Rice is the staple food in Indonesia and we investigate whether its scarcity can be blamed for fueling violence. Following insights from the natural science literature, which claims that increases in minimum temperature reduce rice yields, we maintain that increases in minimum temperature reduce food availability in many provinces, which in turn raises the emergence of actual violence. We adopt an instrumental variable approach and select the instruments taking into account the rice growing calendar. Results show that an increase of the minimum temperature during the core month of the rice growing season, that is, December, determines an increase in violence stimulated by the reduction in future rice production per capita. Results are robust across a number of different functional specifications and estimation methods. From a methodological point of view, we claim that the inconclusive results obtained in this literature may be caused by an overlook of the correct bundle crop/temperature. Studies concentrating on several countries with different crops and using variations of average temperature as a measure of climate change missed the biological mechanism behind the relationship between climate change and violence.

Conflict and development: recent research advances and future agendas

“…While food price shows a clear relationship with instability, new analysis that combines food security and climate change can provide further insight into the food/conflict nexus. In Indonesia, where rice is a staple food crop, changes in minimum temperature during peak December growing season led to decreased food access in later months and a corresponding increase in violence (Caruso et al 2016). Challenges emerge when including climate factors in conflict analysis.…”

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

“…Correlations in largen studies could be due to tactical rather than causative effects and therefore highly context-specific [10•, 93]. This latter critique does not affect all quantitative studies, since some explicitly set out to investigate tactical considerations [50,58,[72][73][74][75].…”

Climate Change and Conflict: Taking Stock

“…Buhaug et al 2015;Caruso, Petrarca, and Ricciuti 2016;Koubi et al 2012;Schleussner et al 2016;Smith 2014;van Weezel 2015;Wischnath and Buhaug 2014). The literature is not short on proposed indirect links from climate change to conflict -among which intermediate implications for food insecurity, production shocks, and migration feature most prominently -but more research is needed along these lines before we are ready to conclude about the nature and strength of such connections.…”