Food Insecurity in Vulnerable Populations: Coping with Food Price Shocks in Afghanistan

Abstract

Based on data from Afghanistan collected prior to and during the 2007-2008 food price crisis, this paper illustrates that caloric intake is an ineffectual indicator for monitoring the onset of food insecurity. Unconditional Quantile Regression estimates indicate that the most vulnerable of households, which cannot afford to make substantial cuts to calories, exhibit no decline in caloric intake in response to increasing wheat prices. In contrast, households with high-calorie diets experience large declines. The estimates also reveal declines in dietary diversity across the entire distribution of households. The most vulnerable households may be sacrificing diet quality to maintain calories, with the potential for serious and long-term health consequences.

Household coping behavior and its contribution to resilience to global macroeconomic shocks in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands

“…Outright reductions in the consumption of utilities, health and education were less common, though still considerable. This is consistent with international evidence that households adjust what they consume before adjusting how much is consumed (Coates et al., ) and evidence that households reduced nonfood expenditure and the quality of food consumed before reducing the quantity of food consumed in response to food price shocks (Akter & Basher, ; Alem & Söderbom, ; D'Souza & Jolliffe, ). Neither savings nor credit featured prominently in households’ coping strategies.…”

“…Of particular alarm, is that around one‐quarter of all households coped with the shocks by reducing the amount of food they consumed. This was a phenomenon similarly observed in response to the price shocks around the world, including Ethiopia (Alem & Söderbom, ); Indonesia (Skoufias, Tiwari, & Zaman, ); Afghanistan (D'Souza & Jolliffe, ); and Vietnam (Gibson & Kim, ). Collectively, in the urban squatter settlements of Port Vila, Luganville, Honiara and Auki, this proportion rose to more than one‐third of households.…”

Price hike of staple food, nutritional impact and consumption adjustment: evidence from the 2005–2010 rice price increase in rural Bangladesh

“…Increased food prices may force households to reduce both the quantity and quality of their food consumption (Brinkman et al, 2010;Alem and Söderbom, 2012;Kumar and Quisumbing, 2013;Akter and Basher, 2014;Hasan, 2016a,b). For instance, the most vulnerable households in Afghanistan sacrificed their diet quality to maintain the intake of calorie at the time of a high food price shock in 2007-08 (D'Souza andJolliffe, 2014). The same event also forced a large proportion of low income households in Bangladesh to reduce their consumption of non rice food items to maintain or even increase their consumption level of rice (Raihan, 2009;Sulaiman et al, 2009).…”

The impact of the 2005–2010 rice price increase on consumption in rural Bangladesh

“…() concludes that the most affected are the young children, pregnant and lactating women, and the chronically ill who have higher food requirements. In the same line, relying on data collected prior to and during the 2007–2008 food price crisis, D'Souza and Jolliffe () find that the most vulnerable households in Afghanistan are those who sacrificed the diet quality to maintain calories. Karfakis et al.…”