 Coping or hoping? Livelihood diversification and food insecurity in the COVID-19 pandemicAnn M. Furbush, Anna Josephson, Talip Kilic and Jeffrey D. Michler Food Policy, 2025, vol. 131, issue C Abstract: We examine the relationship between livelihood diversification and food insecurity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis uses household panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria in which the first round was collected immediately prior to the pandemic and extends through multiple rounds of monthly data collection during the pandemic. Using this pre- and post-outbreak data, and guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate conditional associations between livelihood diversification and food insecurity. Our results do not support the hypothesis that livelihood diversification correlates with household resilience. Though income diversification may serve as an effective coping mechanism for small-scale shocks, we find that for a disaster on the scale of the pandemic this strategy is not effective. Policymakers looking to prepare for the increased occurrence of large-scale disasters will need to grapple with the fact that coping strategies that gave people hope in the past may fail them as they try to cope with the future. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Coping strategies; Food security; Pre-analysis plan; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:131:y:2025:i:c:s0306919225000235 DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102819 Access Statistics for this article Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier |
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