The Remote-Sensing Bridge: Benefits of Leveraging the Seasonal Lags in Wheat Calendars between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres

While it remains highly challenging to timely and accurately forecast cereal production before harvest, recent progress in the assessment of crop growing conditions using remote-sensing (RS) data and techniques allows to effectively estimate cereal yields one or two months before harvest at national scales. Once such forecasts become highly accurate and available to the public in a timely manner, farmers in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will be able to use this information to adjust their production plan by leveraging the seasonal lags in crop calendars between the two hemispheres. Such a response could help reduce supply and price volatilities in world food market. This research aims to quantify the economic benefits of this RS forecasting triggered response in a natural experiment setting, which is based on the case of a poor wheat harvest in Russia and Ukraine in 2012. The simulation tool is a world-trade general equilibrium model with a land allocation module. The results show that the supply responses in the South can mitigate wheat price spikes of regional markets and reduce the adversary welfare shock to African households.