China's food security and early-warning system based on vector autoregression (VAR) model

Abstract: Food safety pre-warning is the process including the application of the pre-warning theory and method, analysis and evaluation of relevant indicators reflecting food safety conditions, prediction of safety development and sounding the pre-warning. China's food safety pre-warning supply derived from the study of China's grain security early warning system, which can be divided into a traditional warning model and a modern warning model. The traditional model is mainly based on the predictions of the trend of the grain production growth rate, predictions of grain supply and demand, predictions of grain staff indexes, predictions of grain fluctuation cycle, and predictions of prosperity.　　Based on China's per capita production and consumption of grain, eggs, meat, aquaculture products, and the price indexes of these four types of products from 1980 to 2011, this study establishes the index for China's food safety early-warning system. The Vector Autoregression Model (VAR) is used to predict China's food safety indicators, and the Principal Component statistical method is used to synthesize the aggregated food safety index, and China's food safety in 2012 and 2013 are projected. Specifically, this study first predicts the food safety indicators by VAR, then synthesize all indicators to an aggregated food safety index using the Principal Component statistical method. The results of this study show that the aggregated indexes of China's food safety of 2012 and 2013 are 62 and 74, respectively. Compared with the real data of 2011, it shows that the prediction error of this model is only 4.2%, which means this model has a high projection precision and can be used for the projection of China's future food security. The results of this study also show that China will have a moderate level of concern on its food safety in 2012-2013.　　In recent years, due to the straining support posed by acceleration of urbanization, shrinking lands, serious contradiction between industrial and agricultural water, lack of investment in water conservancy, and the policy of returning the grain plots to forestry, although we have achieved 8-year grain production harvests consecutively, the depleting resources exacerbated the risk of future food safety, coupled with an upgrading food consumption structure, which has made the food safety situation quite tense.