Mass Media and the Food Crisis: An Analysis of Media Discourse

In 2006-2008, when food prices started to increase dramatically, purchasing power parity of consumers, especially the urban poor, started to decrease automatically. This was named the ‘‘food crisis’’. In contrast, it was not named a ‘‘crisis’’ when the agricultural producers were suffering from low food prices exactly before ‘‘the food crisis’’. The question is under which circumstances we consider a fact as crisis in favour of one’s side. Major objectives of our work are to illustrate how media frames interact to shape the perception of the ‘food crisis’ concept and also to show whether this perception corresponds to the economic theory or not. Conducting a discourse analysis based on media reports can be useful within applied economic research. In this way hypotheses can be tested that are otherwise, e.g. with conventional surveys, hard to test. For instance, surveys may not be feasible because a relevant group of respondents cannot be reached for interviews and secondary data about prices, etc. might in a specific case be uninformative. Clearly, such information has to be handled with care within empirical analyses. However, utilizing such information may in some cases be the only feasible way to obtain a comprehensive panel of stakeholder opinions over a longer period of time. Furthermore, one may argue that newspapers tend to transport only those views that their typical readers would expect. In this study, international newspaper articles from 2000 to 2012 are investigated and the news before and after 2008 are compared in terms of numbers of articles which had been written about the food crisis and their degrees of defense. Political Economy of the Media and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), are used to identify what media say.