Socioeconomic impacts of school feeding programmes: empirical evidence from a South Indian village

Tamil Nadu a poverty-stricken rural community in South India, funds a school feeding program with about 10% of the state budget. Comparisons of nutrition and literacy show that they are significantly related. No studies have yet been performed to analyse the effect of the feeding programs on aspects of a household's economic and social welfare. The feeding program in Tamil Nadu extends throughout the year, 7 days a week. It provides not only a reason for children to attend school, but also employment opportunities for those who wish to cook. 455 households were surveyed from 1 village using. A Gini coefficient of inequality to determine inequality levels of nutrition, food, and consumption expenditure. Sen's index of poverty was used to calculate the reduction in poverty levels. 3 household groups were defined: the agricultural labor, the silk weaver, and the cultivator. Linear program modelling utilized these 3 groups to study the total effect of nutrition on education. Linear regression was then used to determine the effect of the feeding program on participation in school. At the village level, a reduction of inequality in consumption and intake, an increase in energy intake, and a decrease in poverty level were found. In agricultural labor and silk weaver households, most of the money was spent on cereal food grains and children were mostly uneducated. If modelled to assume that children must be educated and are educated in schools providing food, results suggest that the increase in nutrition helps retain the children in the schools. Cultivator household response to the food programs was poor, since they usually have enough money to meet nutritional needs. Household income and school nutrition, but not adult literacy affect school participation. In general, nutrition offered in school caused a subsequent increase in household purchases of non-cereal items in the first 2 household types.     

Food price surges and poverty in urban Colombia: New evidence from household survey data

The present study simulates the impacts of price surges in 2006–2008 on poverty in the main Colombian cities drawing upon household survey data. It is found that the price surges increased both extreme and moderate poverty in urban areas, but the magnitude of poverty rise was not homogeneous across geographical locations or in terms of household characteristics, such as, education or gender of the household head. As a policy option we suggest “geographical targeting” or “demographic targeting” that will select and support poor households by locations or socio-demographic characteristics guided by the degree of household vulnerability to food price shocks.     

Income diversification,poverty traps and policy shocks in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya

This paper presents evidence on the effects of two different sorts of policy shocks on observed income diversification patterns in rural Africa. In Côte d’Ivoire, households with poor endowments were less able to respond to attractive emerging on-farm and non-farm opportunities. Due to entry barriers to superior livelihood strategies, the benefits of exchange rate reform accrued disproportionately to households that were richer prior to devaluation. By contrast, food-for-work transfers to households in Kenya significantly reduced liquidity constraints, enabling project participants to pursue more lucrative livelihood strategies in non-farm activities and higher-return agricultural production patterns. Jointly, these two shocks underscore the importance of liquidity, market access and skill constraints to skilled non-farm income sources to dynamic poverty traps in rural Africa.     

The impact of maize price shocks on household food security: Panel evidence from Tanzania

Using three waves (2008/09, 2010/11, 2012/13) of the Tanzanian National Panel Survey, this study investigates the impact of maize price shocks on household food security. Between 2008/09 and 2012/13, calorie intake stagnated for urban households, yet sharply deteriorated for rural households. The latter was driven by a significant decline in the consumption of the major staple maize which showed strongest price hikes among all major food items. Fixed-effects regressions indicate a clear negative relationship between maize prices and average household energy intake. Almost all population groups were found to be negatively affected by maize price shocks, with rural landless households being the most vulnerable group. In particular, a 50 percent rise in maize prices decreases caloric intake for rural (urban) households on average by 4.4 (5.4) percent, and for rural landless households by 12.6 percent. Results further indicate that subsistence agriculture can act as an effective strategy to insure against food price volatility.     

Impact of food inflation on poverty in the Philippines

We simulate the impact of food inflation between June 2006 and June 2008 on poverty across different areas and between agricultural and non-agricultural households. We explicitly treat the spatial heterogeneity in food inflation and the differences in consumption and production patterns across households by merging household expenditure survey and price datasets at the provincial level or lower. Although some of the poor agricultural households may have escaped poverty, the poorest of the poor, whether they are in an agricultural household or not, are severely and adversely affected by the food inflation.     

Integrating climate change,food prices and population health

The inter-related nature of food, health and climate change requires a better understanding of the linkages and a greater alignment of policy across these issues to be able to adequately meet the pressing social and health challenges arising from climate change. Food price is one way through which climate change may affect health. The aim of this study of the global and Australian food systems is to provide a whole-of-system analysis of food price vulnerabilities, highlighting the key pressure points across the food system through which climate change could potentially have the greatest impact on consumer food prices and the implications for population health. We outline areas where there are particular vulnerabilities for food systems and food prices arising from climate change, particularly global commodity prices; agricultural productivity; short term supply shocks; and less direct factors such as input costs and government policies. We use Australia as a high-income country case study to consider these issues in more detail. The complex and dynamic nature of pricing mechanisms makes it difficult to predict precisely how prices will be impacted. Should prices rise disproportionately among healthy foodstuffs compared to less healthy foods there may be adverse health outcomes if less expensive and less healthy foods are substituted. Higher prices will also have equity implications with lower socio-economic groups most impacted given these households currently spend proportionately more of their weekly income on food. The ultimate objective of this research is to identify the pathways through the food system via which climate change may affect food prices and ultimately population health, thereby providing evidence for food policy which takes into account environmental and health considerations.     

Compounding food and income insecurity in Yemen: Challenges from climate change

This paper provides a model-based assessment of local and global climate change impacts for the case of Yemen, focusing on agricultural production, household incomes and food security. Global climate change is mainly transmitted through rising world food prices. Our simulation results suggest that climate change induced price increases for food will raise agricultural GDP while decreasing real household incomes and food security. Rural non-farm households are hit hardest as they tend to be net food consumers with high food budget shares, but farm households also experience real income losses given that many of them are net buyers of food. The impacts of local climate change are less clear given the ambiguous predictions of global climate models (GCMs) with respect to future rainfall patterns in Yemen. Local climate change impacts manifest itself in long term yield changes, which differ between two alternative climate scenarios considered. Under the MIR scenario, agricultural GDP is somewhat higher than with perfect mitigation and rural incomes rise due to higher yields and lower prices for sorghum and millet. Under the CSI scenario, positive and negative yield changes cancel each other out. As a result, agricultural GDP and household incomes hardly change compared to perfect mitigation.     

Regional trade,government policy and food security: Recent evidence from Zambia

Given heavy dependence on rainfed maize production, countries in East and Southern Africa must routinely cope with pronounced production and consumption volatility in their primary food staple. Typical policy responses include increased food aid flows, government commercial imports and stock releases, and tight controls on private sector trade. This paper examines recent evidence from Zambia, using a simple economic model to assess the likely impact of maize production shocks on the domestic maize price and on staple food consumption under alternative policy regimes. In addition to an array of public policy instruments, the analysis evaluates the impact of two key private sector responses in moderating food consumption volatility – private cross-border maize trade and consumer substitution of an alternate food staple (cassava) for maize. The analysis suggests that, given a favorable policy environment, private imports and increased cassava consumption together could fill roughly two-thirds of the maize consumption shortfall facing vulnerable households during drought years.     

Commodity prices, trade, and poverty in Uruguay

The 2006-2008 food price spike raised concerns about the impact of high commodity prices on poverty in developing countries. This paper addresses these concerns in relation to Uruguay, a small country that exports agricultural commodities and imports fuels. Applying a general equilibrium model, we find that, as a whole, an increase in commodity prices has a positive effect on the economy of Uruguay. Benefits obtained through a growth in export activities are partially outweighed by an increase in crude oil prices. In this context, extreme poverty increases. As in other countries, the increase in food prices affects the already poor population, who become even poorer. This fact highlights the need for policies that mitigate the negative effects of price shocks.     

Gendered impacts of the 2007–2008 food price crisis: Evidence using panel data from rural Ethiopia

This paper provides empirical evidence on the gendered impact of the 2007–2008 food price crisis using panel data on 1400 households from rural Ethiopia that were initially surveyed before the onset of the crisis, in 1994–1995, 1997, and 2004, and after food prices spiked, in 2009. It investigates whether female-headed households are more likely to report experiencing a food price shock, and whether female-headed households experiencing a shock are more (or less) likely to adopt certain coping strategies, controlling for individual, household, and community characteristics. Our findings suggest that female-headed households are more vulnerable to food price changes and are more likely to have experienced a food price shock in 2007–2008. Because female-headed households are also resource poor and have a larger food gap compared with male-headed households, they cope by cutting back on the number of meals they provide their households during good months and eating less preferred foods in general. A combination of short-term measures to protect diet diversity and micronutrient consumption of vulnerable groups and longer-term measures to promote investment in sustainable agriculture, such as strengthening women’s property rights, may increase the ability of poor and vulnerable households to cope better with food price increases.     

The rise of supermarkets and changing expenditure patterns of poor rural households case study in the Transkei area,South Africa

Since the late 1990s, the number of supermarkets in South Africa has been steadily growing. Due to a more effective and efficient management and procurement system, the supermarkets can benefit from economics of scale and sell food at a relative low price. In this paper, we present a case study of two villages in the Transkei area of South Africa. In these poor rural communities, the majority of households now buy their main food items from supermarkets rather than from local shops and farmers. While presenting an important step towards livelihood development and food security, these supermarkets form also a strong competitor for local agricultural sales. The supermarkets provide many food items at lower prices. With an increase in income, the households look for variety and exotism in their food products, and will most likely find this in the supermarkets, rather than the local stores. We argue therefore that development programs should focus on the local growers’ access to the supermarket procurement systems.     

You are what (and where) you eat: Capturing food away from home in welfare measures

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world, and will continue to do so as GDP per person grows and food systems evolve. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys have not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, to shed light on the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether food away from home is accounted for or not. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending over a quarter of their food budget on food away from home since 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for this consumption has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included – a significant reduction. Finally, the inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households across poor/non-poor status – 20 percent of the poor are different, resulting in small but significant differences in the profile of the poor in dimensions such as demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world.     

Rice market integration and food security in Nepal: The role of cross-border trade with India

Coarse rice market integration between Nepal and India is analyzed applying a threshold autoregressive model. The price response behaviour of traders is found to be consistent with an asymmetric price adjustment mechanism, indicating coarse rice prices in Nepal respond to shocks originating in India. The results show that adjustments to negative price deviations from long-run stable equilibrium are faster than adjustments to the positive ones given a null threshold. Given that trade flows mainly from India to Nepal, Nepali traders would adjust their prices upward to align with the long-run equilibrium value relatively more quickly in the case of negative price deviations, than if the price deviations were positive. Such a high speed of adjustment to negative price deviations could be detrimental to net food buyers’ food security status in the absence of a price stabilization mechanism. However, a price stabilization policy in Nepal, a food deficit and import dependent country, would hardly have any effect on prices unless further effort is made to build up the level of national food reserves for short-term food security interventions. In the current context of structurally low levels of national food reserves, an alternative short-term policy such as foreign aid, in the form of food or income transfers, targeting the most vulnerable households to price increases is necessary through social safety net programmes. In the long-run, an improvement of transportation infrastructure between market hubs (other than the Biratnagar trade basin) in the Terai (Nepal) and India would contribute to the reduction of transaction costs and create incentives for more competition in formal cross-border trade with India. In times of negative shocks such as the high food price crisis in 2008, restrictive food trade policies in India will continue to undermine household food security in Nepal.     

Stabilizing food markets in eastern and southern Africa

A major challenge for agricultural policy in Africa is how to address the market instability-related causes of low farm productivity and food insecurity. This paper highlights structural changes affecting the behavior of food markets in eastern and southern Africa and discusses their implications for the design of strategies to stabilize food prices. These changes include (1) an increasing trend in maize prices toward import parity levels, reflecting an emerging structural maize deficit in much of the region; (2) increasingly diversified food consumption patterns in both rural and urban areas; (3) highly concentrated marketed maize surplus, which have largely unrecognized implications for the magnitude of price risk faced by most farm households; and (4) the strategic interactions between private and public marketing actors leading in some cases to heightened market instability and food crises. In the prevailing dual market environment now characterizing most of the region, greater coordination, transparency, and consultation between private and public market actors is needed to achieve reasonable levels of food price stability and predictability.     

Poverty effects of food price escalation: The importance of substitution effects in Mexican households

Recent food price increases reportedly caused significant numbers of households to fall into poverty, particularly in the developing world. Most research into the welfare effects of these food price changes assumes constant demand or approximates second order substitution effects. Poverty forecasts with these assumptions may overestimate or underestimate the effect of food price increases in a nation where most households consume diverse food baskets. We account for full substitution by calculating a theoretically consistent food demand system, accounting for household responses to food price changes by decreasing some food purchases and increasing other food purchases. We use Mexican data to confirm the mitigation of adverse welfare effects from food price increases after accounting for country-specific dietary preferences in modeling demand. In comparison to previous literature, our welfare measures predict theoretically consistent numbers of Mexican households entering poverty due to recent food price changes.     

Methods, results and policy implications of poverty and food security mapping assessments

The importance of poverty reduction to the world development agenda has motivated greater interest in the geographic dimensions of poverty and food security. This special issue of Food Policy includes examples of poverty and food security mapping used to support policy development in agricultural and rural areas. The volume includes eight country case studies and one cross-country comparison that illustrate advances in our capacity to assess welfare over large areas and at detailed spatial resolutions. Poverty mapping facilitates assessments of the role of environmental factors on the broad spatial pattern of poverty and food security. Evaluating proximity and accessibility in welfare outcomes can improve our knowledge of poverty patterns and processes. Spatial statistics can enhance our understanding of geographic and neighbourhood effects on poverty and food security outcomes. The development of effective policies requires increased collaboration among stakeholders, researchers and policy makers in constructing and using poverty and food security maps.     

Spatial clustering of rural poverty and food insecurity in Sri Lanka

We mapped poverty, with reference to a nutrition-based poverty line, to analyse its spatial clustering in Sri Lanka. We used the Divisional Secretariat poverty map, derived by combining the principal component analysis and the synthetic small area estimation technique, as the data source. Two statistically significant clusters appear. One cluster indicates that low poverty rural areas cluster around a few low poverty urban areas, where low agricultural employment and better access to roads are key characteristics. The other indicates a cluster of high poverty rural areas, where agriculture is the dominant economic activity, and where spatial clustering is associated with factors influencing agricultural production. Agricultural smallholdings are positively associated with spatial clustering of poor rural areas. In areas where water availability is low, better access to irrigation significantly reduces poverty. Finally, we discuss the use of poverty mapping for effective policy formulation and interventions for alleviating poverty and food insecurity.     

The power of the vegetable patch: How home-grown food helps large rural households achieve economies of scale & escape poverty

This paper explores how the household’s capacity to grow food impacts their ability to achieve economies of scale in food consumption and how this impacts the geographic distribution of poverty across rural and urban areas. An accurate understanding of consumption economies of scale is vital for comparing poverty levels across households of varying size. Using Sri Lankan data on home-grown food consumption, we empirically confirm that such economies of scale exist and that large households tend to consume relatively more home-grown food than smaller households. The magnitude of these scale economies are found to be larger than those in market purchased food, but smaller than those found in housing expenditure. Consuming more home-grown food is also found to be positively correlated with per-capita calories consumed. Taking these effects into account in poverty estimates leads to a 15 per cent decline in the number of household who fall below the poverty line in rural regions.     

Food subsidies in Egypt: reform options,distribution and welfare

Egypt's food subsidies (in 1996/97 5.5 percent of government expenditures) cover rationed cooking oil and sugar (23 percent of subsidy cost) and unrationed bread and flour (77 percent). The subsidies enhance food security but are nontargeted and have substantial leakages. This paper uses a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short-run effects of alternative food-subsidy scenarios. Government savings from reduced spending finance uniform cuts in direct tax rates across all household types. The model uses a 1996/97 database with detailed household information. The targeting of cooking oil and sugar subsidies to “the needy” (the bottom two quintiles in rural and urban areas) has a progressive effect while elimination of this subsidy is regressive. Disaggregated household consumption changes are small (±0.3 percent). The targeting of all food subsidies is pro-needy, partly due to important indirect effects. The consumption of the needy increases by 0.5 percent with little change for the nonneedy. Food subsidy elimination is regressive: the needy suffer a consumption loss of 1.1 percent. If the government savings instead are transferred to the needy, the impact is reversed: consumption increases by 4.2 percent for needy households while the nonneedy register a small loss. The overall policy implication is that food subsidy reform can benefit the needy with at worst only a modest negative impact on the nonneedy. If the subsidy is entirely eliminated, targeted government programs would be necessary to protect the needy from the negative impact.     

Long-term crop productivity response and its interaction with cereal markets and energy prices

Crop yields are endogenous as long as economic agents adjust to permanent changes in expected prices. The literature, however, does not offer a definitive value of how much yield would change in response to sustained price changes. To fill the gap, we use available scientific findings and data to estimate yield elasticities that enable agricultural commodity and food policy analysis. Using a world market model with short- to long-run yield response, we show the impacts of sustained energy price shocks on global cereal supply and demand. The results highlight substantial differences in quantity and price effects depending on the yield elasticities. These results demonstrate the need to recognize yield response when assessing impacts of energy prices or biofuel production on food uses or, more generally, on food security in the face of income and population growth, evolving dietary patterns, climate change implications, or other long-run pressures.