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

Jawoo Koo, Abdullah Mamun () and Will Martin

No 1923, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Since Amartya Sen’s famous work on Poverty and Famines, economists have understood that policy responses to food market shocks should be guided by changes in households’ incomes and access to food, rather than by overall food availability. Perhaps because the 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 paper, export bans imposed in response to an El Niño event exacerbated the poverty problems resulting from the output shock. The combination of household-level data and crop models used in this paper allows us to assess the impacts of weather and price shocks at the household level, and hence to evaluate the suitability of availability-based policies for dealing with weather shocks. These analytical techniques are also useful in identifying the households and regions adversely affected by food output shocks, and hence in designing policies to improve poor consumers’ access to food.

Keywords: spatial data; climate change; el niño; models; food security; exports; trade; trade policies; poverty; weather; food supply; households; decision-support systems; export controls; capacity development; Zambia; Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Southern Africa; Eastern Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1923

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