Global Food Crises Drive IMF Analysis, Text-Mining Study Finds Across Eight Decades

The IMF’s eight-decade text-mining study shows that its attention to food and agriculture rises sharply during global crises, closely tracking inflation and major policy shifts. It also reveals that food security debates are deeply intertwined with macroeconomic themes such as trade, climate, inequality, and fiscal stability.

In a landmark collaboration drawing on the analytical infrastructure of the IMF’s African Department and the Fund’s wider research ecosystem, a new text-mining study traces how food and agriculture have appeared across IMF publications from 1946 to 2025. Using more than 26,000 documents from the IMF eLibrary and full-text extraction via the Fund Document Extraction Toolkit, authors Tewodaj Mogues and the late Papa Niang reveal a detailed, data-driven picture of how global crises, trade reforms, and inflation cycles have shaped the Fund’s engagement with food systems. Their research shows that the IMF’s treatment of food security and agricultural policy has been far more prominent and far more reactive to global shocks than commonly assumed.

When Food Prices Spike, IMF Publications Surge

Across eight decades, references to food and agriculture rise sharply whenever the global economy is shaken by food-price turmoil. The early-1970s stagflation period triggered the first significant wave of food-related analysis, followed by another surge later in the decade as cereal prices soared. The mid-1990s brought a different catalyst: the creation of the World Trade Organization through the Uruguay Round, which placed agriculture squarely under new trade disciplines, prompting IMF research into food-price implications for vulnerable importers. The 2008 global food-price spike produced another flood of analytical and policy papers. Most recently, the 2022 shock induced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a new escalation, informing emergency tools such as the Food Shock Window. Throughout these episodes, the study finds that IMF references to food and agriculture closely track global inflation trends, often rising with little to no lag.

The Deepest Thinking Happens in Selected Issues Papers

Although Working Papers, Article IV reports, and program reviews generate the highest volume of food-related content, the most intensive analytical work appears in Selected Issues Papers (SIPs). SIPs contain the densest concentration of agricultural and food-security terminology, reflecting their role in exploring structural issues affecting country-level macroeconomic stability. Newer outlets also stand out. The IMF Notes series, launched in 2022, shows a high share of food-focused material simply because its inception coincided with the latest global food crisis. Meanwhile, earlier outlets that were heavy on data, such as Statistical Appendixes and Tables, historically included a high proportion of agricultural references before their discontinuation.

Regions Tell Different Stories, from SSA to Emerging Europe

Geography strongly shapes the IMF’s food-policy discourse. Sub-Saharan Africa dominates both in the share and number of publications referencing food and agriculture, unsurprising for a region where agriculture is central to livelihoods and food insecurity remains a macroeconomic threat. Emerging and Developing Asia ranks next. Yet intensity tells a different story: food-related reports on Emerging and Developing Europe show the highest degree of focus, frequently placing food themes directly in titles and abstracts. This pattern reflects the extensive agricultural reforms that followed post-socialist transitions. Advanced economy publications, by contrast, rarely engage with food topics. Full-text analysis reveals that consumption-side issues, hunger, food inflation, and welfare impacts surge during crisis years, while production-side themes such as crop yields, fertilizer use, and agricultural reform come to the fore in more stable periods. Fiscal Monitors and global surveillance flagships concentrate on demand-side issues, whereas SIPs and Staff Discussion Notes probe deeper into supply dynamics.

Food Security as a Lens Into Inflation, Climate, and Inequality

The study highlights how food-related IMF work intersects with four major macro-policy themes: inflation, trade, climate change, and inequality. Among these, inflation dominates. Food-related publications contain more than 17 times as many references to inflation as non-food-related papers, confirming how central food-price dynamics are to IMF macroeconomic analysis. Climate change ranks second in thematic intensity, reflecting the accelerating recognition of agriculture’s exposure to climate shocks. Trade and inequality appear more moderately but consistently, underscoring how food-price movements and agricultural policies carry distributional consequences and shape external-sector vulnerabilities. Taken together, these thematic overlaps show that food and agriculture are not fringe topics for the IMF; they are deeply interwoven with the institution’s most critical streams of economic surveillance and policy advice.