Reconsidering Media Discourses on Food Crisis from a Quantitative Perspective

In 2007–2008, when food prices started to increase dramatically, purchasing power parity of consumers, especially the urban poor, started to decrease automatically. High food prices were argued to cause poverty, hunger, and food riots among urban populations. Henceforward, “food crisis” became a new storyline in the current debate. In contrast, in the pre-2007 period, when rural farmers had been facing negative welfare effects of low food prices for many years, there were no crisis talks. This article analyzes different media coverage of urban consumers and rural producers under changes in relative incomes for the 2000–2013 period and propounds media bias on the food crisis debate by using content analysis and the OLS regression model.