From bad to worse: Poverty impacts of food availability responses to weather shocks

Abstract

Since Amartya Sen's famous work on Poverty and Famines, economists have understood that the impacts of food market shocks on the poor depend much more on their impacts on households’ incomes and access to food than on overall food availability, and that availability‐based policies frequently exacerbate adverse impacts on household welfare. Perhaps because household‐level impacts are not directly observable many policy makers have continued to rely on availability‐oriented policies such as export bans. In the Zambia case considered in this article, export bans imposed in response to an El Niño event appear to have greatly exacerbated the small increase in poverty resulting from the weather shock. The combination of household‐level data and crop models used in this article allows us to assess the impacts of weather and price shocks at the household level, and to evaluate the suitability of availability‐based policies for dealing with weather shocks. These analytical techniques can also help identify the households and regions adversely affected, and design policies to improve poor consumers’ access to food.

Agriculture's globalization: Endowments, technologies, tastes and policies

“…Such sporadic policy responses tend to destabilize many domestic and international markets, and frequently reduce food security by focusing on the availability of food rather than on the more economically relevant ability of vulnerable groups to access food (Sen, 1981). A recent example is for maize in Zambia, which added to poverty because the poorest households were net sellers of maize (Koo et al., 2021).…”

Extreme weather events and high Colombian food prices: A non‐stationary extreme value approach1

“…Regarding to international food trade, Colombia has maintained a net commercial surplus. While exports are concentrated in primary products for consumption and industry, imports are linked to processed products for intermediate consumption and industry (See consequences in terms of food security (Devereux, 2007;Koo et al, 2021). 26…”

“…Our objective is to evaluate how the Colombian rainfall level and some other relevant economic variables (Fuel prices and exchange rate) are the determinants that help to explain the high food prices. Our model is a reduced form and it does not consider all the possible transmission channels, so our results exclude the measurement of the impact of climate on the productivity of the land (Anderson et al., 2017; Antonio et al., 2021; Haile et al., 2021), the role of international food trade (Baldos & Hertel, 2015; Burgess & Donaldson, 2010; Davis et al., 2021), or the consequences in terms of food security (Devereux, 2007; Koo et al., 2021).…”

Political and economic determinants of export restrictions in the agricultural and food sector

“…When the output is above normal, domestic food prices will be low, and the government will have fewer incentives to restrict exports to lower domestic food prices. Another potentially relevant explanation is a country's aim to maintain self‐sufficiency (Koo et al., 2021). When countries are motivated to maintain food self‐sufficiency, good weather makes policymakers less worried about self‐sufficiency and, therefore, less likely to use export restrictions.…”