Recently, Lu Qinan, Assistant Professor of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China (RUC) published an article entitled "Ozone stress and crop harvesting failure: Evidence from US food production" in the academic journal Food Policy.

The study is joint research of Liu Ziheng, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Lu Qinan, an assistant professor at RUC, who is the sole corresponding author of the study. The study analyzed the effects of near-surface ozone on crop abandonment behaviors.

It is noted that Assistant Prof. Lu Qinan still has several papers on assessing the impact of climate change and air pollution on the agricultural fields under review by top-notch academic journals in the field.

Global exposure to surface-level ozone pollution has increased over the past century. The decision to abandon crops is a crucial behavioral response when facing environmental stresses. Growers abandon crops to minimize losses when the revenues of collecting crops are expected to be lower than the costs of harvesting crops. Based on a dataset constructed from USDA Quick Stats and satellite based aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals over the time interval 2003–2021, this study measures the responses of the corn and soybean harvested ratios, the ratios of harvested acres to planted acres, to ozone stress. This dataset contains information on the harvested ratios of corn and soybeans as well as pollutant concentrations and weather conditions over the growing seasons for each county in each year. This study aims to provide the first empirical evidence of the impact of ozone pollution on the decision to abandon crops.

This study find evidence that a one-standard-deviation rise in ozone concentration decreases the harvested ratios of corn and soybeans by 0.133 and 0.151 standard deviations, respectively. We interpret these estimates of harvested ratios as ozone-induced crop abandonment and show that the production benefits from ozone control would be considerably underestimated without considering the adjustments in crop abandonment.  Our bootstrap simulation results suggest that without accounting for the saved acreage that should have been abandoned, the production benefits from a one-standard-deviation decrease in ozone concentrations will be underestimated by 49.561 % for corn and 32.479 % for soybeans, which are equivalent to 2.133 billion USD and 0.494 billion USD in monetary terms.

The study also further investigates the heterogeneous effects of ambient ozone on the decision to abandon crops with respect to various insurance enrollment rates and received crop prices. We find evidence that a higher insurance enrollment rate aggravates the reduction in both corn and soybean harvested ratios induced by ozone pollution. This adaptation disincentive induced by insurance suggests that policymakers may mitigate the unexpected behavioral distortions by refining insurance design. Contrary to the consistent effects of insurance on both corn and soybeans, the price effects vary. While a higher received price mitigates the reduction in the soybean harvested ratio caused by ozone, its impact on the ozone-induced reduction in the corn harvested ratio is in the opposite direction, and such a discrepancy may be explained by the option to harvest corn grain early as silage.

 For more details, please refer to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102540.

About the journal:

Food Policy is a multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and novel evidence on issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the food sector in developing, transition, and advanced economies.

The journey is an SSCI and SCI journal published by Elsevier Publishing Group. It is a top academic journal that focuses on high-level research results in food economy and food policy. The journal has an impact factor of 6.08 and is a JCR 1 journal, which is always one of the journals with the highest impact factor in the field of agricultural economics. Food Policy, together with American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Economics and Journal of Agricultural Economics, are considered as the four most authoritative international journals in the field of agricultural economics.