Food Aid in Response to Acute Food Insecurity

Christopher Barrett

No 06-10, Working Papers from Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO - ESA)

Abstract: This paper reviews the role of food aid in response to humanitarian emergencies. It outlines a set of basic principles for effective food aid interventions, and analyses a number of case studies in humanitarian response. The paper distinguishes between rapid onset and slow onset emergencies and between ‘idiosyncratic’ emergencies affecting individuals or households and ‘covariate’ emergencies affecting entire communities or countries. The lead-time afforded by slow-onset emergencies could be – but usually is not – used to mount early interventions aimed at averting full-scale disasters. Emergency response is too heavily dominated by food aid, especially aid sourced in donor countries, to the neglect of more effective and less costly interventions. What’s more, idiosyncratic shocks are usually overlooked in humanitarian response. The paper draws a number of ‘lessons learned’ from recent experience with different types of humanitarian emergencies. It argues that emergency food aid is often a necessary part of humanitarian response to acute food insecurity, but it is rarely sufficient.

Keywords: food aid; food insecurity; humanitarian response; emergency response. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 O19 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/ag036e/ag036e00.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.fao.org: No such host is known.

Related works:
Working Paper: Food aid in response to acute food insecurity (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fao:wpaper:0610

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO - ESA) Agricultural Sector in Economic Development Service FAO Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 00153 Rome Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gustavo Anríquez ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).